Little Flower Institute of Philosophy & Religion

Aluva 1, 2017-2018

Dr. Jojo Joseph Varakukalayil

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CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY(PART II)

EXISTENTIALISM
PART ONE

1. General Introduction

Greek and Hebraic tradition of human history unfolds the quest for
human transcendence; for the Greek tradition it was achieved by the
abstraction of reason beyond the temporal particularities of
existence; and for the Hebraic tradition, the experience of
transcendence is understood in terms of faith in an
incomprehensible God. Human existence is frail, finite, naked, and
filled with sin before the unknowable God. The book of Job presents
the plight of human existence and the incomprehensible majesty of
the divine. The idea of the eternal can be revealed in human
passionate commitments that are finite and temporal. The agonies
and cries of the people can in certain sense is taken to the beyond
dimension where transcendence comes to pass in the concrete bare
human existence who inhabits this world.

The more fashionable a philosophy becomes, the more elusive is its

definition. The meaning of Existentialism is often taken as
meaninglessness as this term is also meaningless. It has been
derived from the word “Existence”. Certain questions have been
raised about the existence of man in this universe. According to
Sartre philosophy of Existentialism, it is modern system of
belief made famous by Sartre in the 1940s in which the world
has no meaning each person is alone and completely
responsible for their own action by which they make their own
character. Existentialism is an extension of existence that talks
about man and his status in this universe.

1.1 What is Existentialism?

Have you ever felt like you don't know where you're going, or if
you're making any progress at all in your career or your life? If so,
you were most likely having an 'existential
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moment.' Existentialism is a philosophical and literary perspective

that focuses on the experience of an individual person and the way
that he or she understands the world. After World War II, some
philosophers and writers saw the world as an indifferent place
without a set of universal rules that applied to everyone. In light of
the large number of casualties, the Holocaust and the use of the first
atomic bomb, post-war writers in particular found societal rules and
views especially unreliable.

Furthermore Existentialism is a philosophical movement that

views human existence as having a set of underlying themes
and characteristics, such as anxiety, dread, freedom, awareness of
death and consciousness of existing. Existentialism is also an
outlook, and a perspective on life that pursues the question of
life or the meaning of existence. This question is seen as being
of paramount importance above all others scientific and
philosophical pursuits.

1.2 History
The back ground and history of existentialism could be seen from the
existential context of the 19th century Europe. Philosophers who
debated the meaning of life in 19th-century Europe were trying to
understand what it meant to have a 'self' and how human beings
could live an ethical existence. While mathematicians and scientists
explored the natural laws of the universe, religious people and
theologians discussed God's expectations for a good life and the
human soul. At the same time, social scientists tried to explain
economic and social phenomena through methods involving logic
and reason. In comparison to the vastness of the universe, it's not
surprising that human experiences and lives often seemed brief and
insignificant. Inevitably, people may have wondered: 'Why do so
many bad things happen to good people?' And if there was an
omnipotent being, why did that being seem indifferent rather than
interested in what happened to us?

After the Second World War, existential writers started to think of

human beings in more individualistic terms, as confused and
powerless as they might be in the universe. Instead of focusing on
society's expectations of a person, existential philosophers and
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literary figures aimed to explore the meaning individuals created for

themselves. They were not interested in painting a rosy or optimistic
picture of the world; instead, they were willing to point out
challenges that often had no solutions.

1.3Types of Existentialism
In term of the existence and relevance of God, there are three
schools of existentialism thought:
1. Theistic Existentialism ( Kierkegaard, Buber, and Marcel)
2. Atheistic Existentialism ( Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus)
3. Agnostic Existentialism (Heidegger)
4. Literary Existentialism (Kafka and Dostoyevsky)

Sartre’s dictum, “ Existentialism precedes and rules essence”

generally taken to mean that there is no pre-defined essence to
humanity, except that which people make for themselves.
Sartrean Existentialism does not acknowledge the existence of
God or any other determining principle, human beings are free
to act as they choose.

In contrast to the Sartre’s atheism stands Kierkegaard’s

Christian Existentialism which according to Kierkegaard was
inspired by Socrates, he never referred to himself existentialist,
but rather as “ the unique individual”, Focused on the
relationship of Self and the God. However he argued that an
individual could, despite one’s doubt have faith that God exists
and God is good. This leap of faith was for Kierkegaard a
choice that an individual must make in defining his or her life.
He expresses and finally the leap of faith as the aesthetic,
Ethical and Religious in his Essay “ Either / Or.”The third class
of Existentialism (Agnostic) is commonly misconstrued as the
simplest “ the safest” philosophy to adapt : embrace life for what
it is (whatever that may be). The Agnostic existentialist makes no
claim to know or not know. If there is “greater picture” in play;
rather, he simply recognizes that the greatest truth is that which
he choose to act upon.
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2. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
According to existentialists, human beings spend their lives in a void
plagued by angst and despair in a world defined by alienation and
absurdity. Absurdity refers to the persistence of human beings in
living out our lives, despite little evidence that what we do matters in
the greater universe. We create meaning in our lives even when there
is little or no evidence of a natural force or omnipotent being
protecting or guiding us. We simply continue to exist
aimlessly.Existentialists also used words like 'authenticity' and
experience, instead of viewing your experience as defined by outside
forces, such as God, the greater society or the universe.

2.1 Existence Precedes Essence

Existentialism gets its name from an insistence that life is only
understandable in terms of an individual’s existence, his particular
life experience. It says a person lives (has existence) rather
than is (has being or essence), that every person’s experience of life is
different from another’s, and that individuals’ lives can be
understood only in terms of their commitment to living responsibly.
The question existentialists ask is, “Who am I?” with its suggestion of
the uniqueness and mystery of each life and an emphasis upon the
personal rather than the impersonal. To the existentialist, man is the
centre of the universe, the centre of infinity, and from this view
comes much of the rest of existentialism. Among the leading atheistic
existentialist philosophers are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Sartre, and Camus.

Existentialists believe that man’s own individual experience or

“existing” comes before anything such as a general purpose,
goodness or “truth," or any other Absolute that may be felt to
exist.Man creates himself through his own thoughts and actions,
since the only reality for an individual is that of his own personal
existence and nothing else.

This responsibility of creating something out of “nothingness” often

brings with it a mood of “angst,” anguish or dread.The following
statements espouse Existentialism ─ a term applied to a group of
attitudes current in philosophical, religious and artistic thought
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during and after World War II ─which emphasises existence rather

than essence, and recognises the inadequacy of human reason to
explain the enigma of the universe as a basic philosophical
question.Though the term is so broadly and loosely used that an
exact definition is not possible, existentialists assume as a significant
fact that people and things in general exist, but that things have no
meaning for us except as individuals, through acting upon them, can
create meaning.“Existence precedes essence.” ─ Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Man is condemned to be free.” ─ Jean-Paul Sartre. “In a universe
that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a
stranger. His is an irremediable exile … This divorce between man
and his life, the actor and his stage, truly constitutes the feeling of
Absurdity.” ─ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. “Cut off from his
religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his
actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”

2.2 Authentic and Inauthentic Existence

All existentialists, whether they are theists or atheists, are constantly
preoccupied with the question of authenticity and inauthenticity of
existence. The magnum desiderabileof every existentialist is an
authentic and meaningful existence. For Kierkegaard, authentic
existence is achieved by making the leap of faith and by becoming
totally committed to a life of subjectivity and truth. Heidegger s man
is also urged to live authentically by means of the existential choices
he makes in dread and in the shadow of death. Heidegger has even
coined a word, das Man, to denote the faceless, anonymous
individual who is guilty of inauthentic existence.For Buber, Marcel
and Berdyaev, authentic existence is always grounded in communion
and intersubjectivity. Every I-Thou relationship between two human
beings bestows authenticity of existence upon them because they
both reach out to the Absolute and Eternal Thou, Who is the very
ground and foundation of their being.

Jean Paul Sartre likewise speaks of the need for a truly authentic
existence, even though his intellectual climate is that of an avowed
atheist. Sartre’s man, who is “to freedom condemned,” must choose
resolutely, despite the fact that he has absolutely no basis for his
choices. One who refuses to choose is guilty of bad faith, which is
always associated with an inauthentic existence.
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For the early Camus, the The Myth of Sisyphus, Cross Purpose and
The Stranger, authentic existence is a life amidst the absurd.
Authenticity of existence demands a rejection of both physical and
philosophical suicide. Sisyphus, who defiantly scorns the gods who
have condemned him to roll his stone endlessly, is the
personification of authentic existence. For the later Camus, authentic
existence has moved from an ethics of sheer quantity to an ethics of
quality. A common brotherhood of man, an insistence that there
must be a difference between stoking the Nazi crematory fires and
devoting one’s life to the care of lepers, the emphasis on limits and
on stable essences or natures in the context of early Greek
philosophy—these postures characterize an authenticity of existence
in the later Camus.

2.3 Community, I-Thou,

Co-Esse, Intersubjectivity
The themes of togetherness, I-Thou, and “being-with” are
fundamental to the postures of Marcel, Buber, Berdyaev and the later
Camus. Man is not an island and in order to lead a meaningful and
authentic existence, he must establish a loving and mutually
reciprocal relationship with other human beings. Basic to this
posture is the unqualified treatment of a fellow human being as a
genuine "Thou,” an individual who has personal rights and
sacredness and dignity that I must respect. The meaningfulness and
authenticity of my existence as an "I” is totally conditioned by the
generosity with which I make myself available in mutual love,
fidelity, faith and disponibility to the Thou. In a word, the
authenticity of my existence is completely dependent on my
genuineness toward the other; the other is the unique means of
enriching my own existence. In Buber, the recurrent theme is that of
the I-Thou in genuine community (versus collectivism and
individualism). Berdyaev speaks of that untranslatable sobornost as
denoting real community. Marcel finds the I-Thou as pivotal for
intersubjectivity and co-esse. Although Heidegger does speak very
briefly of a Mit-Sein in his Being and Time, the Heideggerian
DASEINis a solitary and isolated individual in his world of
thrownness, homelessness and Angst.
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The later Camus, as seen in Letters to a German Friend, The Plague

and The Rebel, likewise opts for a human solidarity. Contrary to the
proud isolation of the defiant Sisyphus, the hero of the absurd, who
personified the early Camus, we are now urged to exercise a human
compassion, a loving solicitude for our fellow man. A sense of
togetherness and community becomes the dominant theme. Camus
still finds no hope or rationality in the universe but minimally, he
does admit an ethics of quality. There are certain stable essences and
natures and there are limits on men’s actions. The quantitative ethics
of nihilism must be rejected. Man must aid his fellow man. He must
extend a helping hand in combatting the evils of the plague.

2.4 Unable to Deal with the Depths of Life

There are two parts to this idea: first, that reason is relatively weak
and imperfect, (people often do not do the “right” thing), and second,
that there are dark places in life which are “non-reason,” to which
reason scarcely penetrates, (meaning we often commit acts which
seem to defy reason, to make no sense). Existentialism unites reason
with the irrational portions of the psyche, insisting that people must
be taken in their wholeness and not in some divided state; that
the whole of a person contains not only intellect, but also anxiety,
guilt and the will to power, which can change and sometimes
overwhelm reason. If humanity is seen in this light, we are very
ambiguous and full of contradictions and tensions. The emphasis of
the existentialist is not on idea, but upon the thinker who has the
idea. Existentialism accepts not only people’s power of thought, but
their fallibility, frailty, body, etc. and above all, their death. People
are felt to find their true selves not in the detachment of thought but
in the involvement and agony of choice and in the pathos of
commitment to choice.

2.5 Estrangement, Absurdity, Homelessness, Alienation

Existentialism holds that, since the Renaissance, people have slowly
been separated from concrete earthly existence. Individuals have
been forced to live at ever higher levels of abstraction, have been
collectivised out of existence, and have driven God from the heavens,
(or, what is the same thing to the existentialist), from the hearts of
men. It is believed that individuals live in a fourfold condition of
alienation: from God, from nature, from other people, and from our
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own “true” selves. People have become hollow, powerless, faceless. At

a time in our history when mankind’s command over the forces of
nature seems to be unlimited, existentialism depicts human beings as
weakened, ridden with nameless dread.

2.6 “Fear and Trembling“ and Anxiety

The optimism of the 18th and 19th centuries gives way, after WW I,
to the Great Depression, WW II and the Holocaust, to a feeling of
pessimism, fear and anxiety. Another kind of anxiety facing
individuals in the 20thC when the philosophy of existentialism
develops is “the anguish of Abraham,” the necessity which is laid
upon people to make “moral” choices on their own sense of
responsibility. The existentialists claim that each of us must make
moral decisions in our own lives which involve the same anguish that
faced Abraham. In this parable, Abraham is commanded by God to
sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham thus becomes the paradigm of one
who must make a harrowing choice, in this case between his love for
his son and his love for God, between the universal law which states,
“thou shalt not kill,” and the unique inner demand for his religious
faith. Abraham’s decision, which violates the abstract and collective
law of man, is not made in arrogance, but in “fear and trembling,”
one of the inferences being that sometimes, one must take an
exception to the general law because he is (existentially) an
exception; an individual whose existence can never be completely
controlled by any universal law.

2.7 The Encounter with Nothingness

According to the existentialists, for individuals alienated from God,
from nature, from other people and even from themselves, what is
left at last but Nothingness? This is, simply stated, how existentialists
see humanity: on the brink of a catastrophic precipice, below which
yawns the absolute void, black Nothingness, asking ourselves, “Does
existence ultimately have any purpose?”

2.8 Freedom
For the existentialists, no idea is more central than freedom. As
Kierkegaard puts it, “the most tremanedous thing which has been
granted to man is choice [and] freedom.” A centruaryy later Sartre
will refer to freedom as the defining feature of existentialism. “at the
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heart,” Sartre writes, “ what existentialism shows is the connection

between the absolute character of [freedom], by virtue of which every
man realizes himself.” Sooner or later, as a theme that includes all
the others mentioned above, existentialist writings bear upon
freedom. All of these ideas either describe some loss of individuals’
freedom or some threat to it, and all existentialists of whatever sort
are considered to enlarge the range of human freedom.From the
characteristics of existentialism that have been outlined above, one
might be led to believe that this is a philosophy predicated upon an
acute sense of hopelessness. The cause may well be one of despair for
people, but the effect ─ as can readily be seen in the existential
literature of Albert Camus ─ asserts the possibility for improvement,
if not hope.

Most pessimistic belief systems find the source of their despair in the
fixed imperfection of human nature or of the human context;
however, the existentialist, denies all absolute principles and holds
that human nature is fixed only in that we have agreed to recognise
certain attributes. It is therefore subject to change by a single
individual if he acts bravely in contradiction to the accepted
principles. Therefore, for the existentialist, the possibilities of
altering human nature and society are unlimited, but at the same
time, individuals can hope for help in making such alterations only
from within themselves.

3. TERMS IN EXISTENTIALISM
3.1 The Absurd: The absurd can occur only when two elements are
present: our desire to explain “reality,” and the recognition that the
world is not thus explicable, but that it exists without apparent
justification, foundation or purpose.
3.2 Nausea: Nausea is the feeling of repulsion that overtakes us
when we become aware of the absurdity of existence, the
“meaninglessness” of life.
3.3 Anguish: Anguish is the normal condition of those who become
aware of their total liberty, and of the fact that there are no universal
values to justify the choices they have made.
3.4 Authentic: Individuals who have grasped and accepted the fact
that they are free, who have realised what their situation is, and who
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have, within that situation, chosen to engage themselves responsibly

in the world around them so as to affirm their liberty.
3.5 Choice: Individuals are condemned, because they are free, to
choose what they are going to be through their daily actions. The
choice also implies the attitude of others and hence is another source
of anguish.
3.6 Bad Faith: Bad faith, or self-deception, is the attitudes of those
who seek to escape from the anguish and the nausea that inevitably
follow the realisation that individuals are free and the world is
ultimately absurd.
3.7 Freedom: To be free is to recognise one’s complete
independence; to make one’s own life through one’s own initiative; to
reject any idea of absolute good or absolute evil and to accept no
judge or mentor except one’s own conscience.

PART TWO

I. SOREN KIERKEGAARD (1813-1855)

Introduction
Anti-Hegel
Kierkegaard’s basic outlook is the very antithesis of Hegel’s. Whereas
the latter sought to reconcile oppositions and to blend and integrate
opposite ends of the spectrum into one reconciling synthesis, which
would blunt neither extreme, Kierkegaard called for a clear-cut
radical commitment one way or the other. If the Hegelian ideal was
both/and, Kierkegaard upheld a strict either/or. Which, as we know,
is the verytitle of ne of his most well-known works?
The crowd
Kierkegaard was of the opinion that the journey to selfhood will
succeed to the extent that one rises above the values, goals and
attitudes of the common herd and strives to realize his unique
unrepeatable identity. “a crowd… in its very concept is the untruth,
by reason, of the fact that it renders the individual completely
impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of
responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.” (The point of view) he
completely reject the Hegelian notion of man realizing his true
essence in proportion as he distances himself from what is taken to
be mere particularity and becomes a moment in the life of the
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universal. Where this universal be the state of humanity or absolute

thought is irrelevant, for him: all such theories are false.

KIERKEGAARD’S PHILOSOPHY OF MAN

Kierkegaard’s dialectic of man Like Hegel, Kierkegaard also
envisaged a triadic dialectical process by means of which his journey
to full self-realization. But, whereas for Hegel, this finds its full
flowering in the form of the all-comprehensive universal, for
Kierkegaard-characteristically-it is actualized in the fullest
development of the existent individual. And each stage is brought
about by a conscious and deliberate leap, wherein one chooses either
to settle for the lower level admits chap securities or venture forth
risk fully to the challenge of the higher. There is no more or less
automatic working out of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in the
conceptual order. It is a deliberative, volative activity.

Stage one: the Aesthetic

The first stage is characterized by sensual dissipation. The aesthetic
man is governed by sense, impulse and emotion-hence, he is not
necessarily and exclusively a man of crude appetites that must be
fulfilled. Granted that ‘wine, women and song’ are often the sole
interests of a man of this type, he cold equally be a man whose
imagination predominates and who transmutes the world into a
romantic realm. The pursuit of beauty and pleasure are his major
goals, not moral law or goodness. The youthful Kierkegaard seems to
have passed thought this phase. A bon vivant, he at least once visited
a house of ill-repute, took great care to dress well, spent vast sums of
money on good food, passed long hours driving through the beautiful
scenery in his elegant horse and carriage. Such a man imagines that
his existence is the very embodiment of freedom, but it is hardly a
freedom a freedom worthy of the type of being that he is, which he is
enjoying. “the soulish- bodily synthesis is in every man planned with
a view to being sprit, such is the building; but the man prefers to
dwell in the cellar, that is, in the determinants of sensuousness”, as
he sums is up in The Sickness Unto Death. Don Juan is the great
hero and ideal of this level. But it is an unhappy level. Deep down,
man is unhappy, disgusted with himself and “despair” assails him
concerning his condition. He knows that there is no meaningful
fulfillment, no real salvation for him so long as he remains at this
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depth. Either he must live with deep-rooted dissatisfaction land

despair among the shallow pleasures of this aestheticism or he must,
by a clear act of self committed choice, make the risky transition to
the next stage. It is no mere question of thinking about it. He must
act, choose either-or!

Stage two: the Ethical

Here, a man accepts determinate moral standards, laws and codes as
a guide to his life. This is above all exemplified by the man who once
allowed his sexual desire unbridled expression, as with Don Juan,
and who now brings it freely under the control of marital life and
fidelity. At this stage, reason predominates – reason and its universal
laws and structures take over from wild sensuality. This stage is
characterized by the rise of the tragic hero who “renounces himself in
order to accept the universal” (Fear And Trembling) – like Socrates
or Antigone, who both defied unjust laws and then accepted the
death penalty that these brought, though they could have easily
escaped. The second stage has as its great hero Socrates, a man who
had an extremely powerful impact on Kierkegaard, as we shall see.
However, the tragic hero soon discovers his share of dissatisfaction
and despair.

He has a clear consciousness of the ethical norm, the unwritten

demands of the natural law. But he has no understanding of sin. Not
unaware of man’s weakness, he still thinks that it is possible for man,
in the long run, to overcome his sinful tendencies. But sooner or later
he realized his own inability to obey moral laws and acquire full
perfection. Now Socrates must make his either or choice. He can only
pull himself out of the despair that result in his acknowledgement of
human frailty and inability by making a leap of faith,, by relating
oneself to god and his grace.

Stage three: Faith

It is only when one affirms his relationship to god and opens himself
to the transcendent absolute that one truly affirms his identity as
spirit. “By relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the
self is grounded transparently in the power which constituted it. And
this formula… is the definition of faith.” (The Sickness Unto Death)
as finite, man is alienated from God and this is his misery. But he has
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a finite dimension, too, in the sense that he is a journeying of the

spirit towards god. Once man accepts this latter dimension of his
existence, he becomes what he truly is. Since it might not be very
clear to many as to just how the moral man differs from the man of
faith, Kierkegaard underscores the example of Abraham who is ready
to even go against the regular ethical law and slay his own son as an
expression of his faith-response to god. Either the moral law is
supreme and then Abraham is guilty of intended murder, or “the
individual (stands) in absolute relation to the absolute.” Evidently
Abraham “is neither a tragic hero nor an aesthetic hero.” (Fear and
Trembling) Copeston suggest that Kierkegaard’s own unhappy
relationship with Regine may be better understood in terms of the
ideas implicit here. If the moral law takes precedence over all, then
his breaking of the engagement was a criminal act. But it the
individual’s response to the call of the absolute must take precedence
over all ethical norms, then his desertion of the poor girl in order to
respond to what, in faith, he felt convinced was god’s call, then his
action was supremely laudable.

Reason and Faith

If Hegel’s dialectic was a movement of integration and sublimation,
Kierkegaard’s was one of discontinuity. In other words, it implied a
radical break with what had gone before – a true leap. This leap is
never explicable rationally, never vindicable by a strict proof. The
great fault of Hegel had been his attempt to rationalize faith. The
German, at the end of his system, holds out to modern man a
bewitching vista of “an illusory land, which to a mortal eye might
appear to yield a certainty higher than that of faith.” But this is
illusory and the claim that this is true Christianity is an out and out
fraud. In his Concluding Unscientific PostScript, wherein he bade
Farwell to all consciously philosophical writings and turned his work
to prophetic denunciations of established Christianity, Kierkegaard
gives us his famous definition of subjective truth: “an objective
uncertainty held fast in an appropriation- process of the most
passionate inwardness is he truth, the highest attainable for the
existing individual.” Not the Kierkegaard denied that there is an
objective truth (mathematical propositions, for instance). He just
denied their value for the existing individual – to a man’s life of self –
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commitment and growth. Form this just quoted definition we can

immediately see that there is a close link between faith and risk.
“Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction
between the infinite passion of the individual’s awareness and the
objective uncertainty.”

The concept of the Dread

This is a very fashionable existential term and it was Kierkegaard
who brought into the foreground of philosophical debate this world.
The corresponding usage in French is angoisse and, in German, it is
Angst, commonly translated in English as anxiety or fear. But fear
has a special meaning in Kierkegaard and dread has been used in the
title of Kierkegaard’s famous work on the subject. Os it would be
better to retain this world. In Kierkegaard it has a special link with
the idea of sin, but it is also the feeling or emotion that predominates
the moment when one is wrestling with his either-or decision at the
threshold of the stage in life’s way. It is defined enigmatically as “a
sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.” (The Concept
of Dread). At one and the seam time it frightens us off and allures us.
Whereas fear only scares us off without somehow beckoning us,
dread essentially concerns the unknown (indeed, it is the mysterious
fascination of the unknown that makes it also attract us). Fear, on the
contrary is directed to a given known: my neighbors’ dog or the
snake I have just seen. That is why it also comes about the “dread is
the possibility of freedom.” It makes us conscious of certain dialectic,
of two different pulls in two different directions and the fact that it is
up to us to decide which of these is the one we shall follow, for both
possibilities open up to us. So, “dread is the possibility of freedom….
The alarming possibility of being able.” (The Concept of Dread).

PHILOSOPHY OF GOD
God’s Existence
Kierkegaard’s main thesis about the existence of God is that it can
only be known by the leap of faith. It is a question of being willing to
“let the proof go” and make the saltomortale as some have described
it (the mortal leap). In any case, Kierkegaard was reluctant to apply
the term “existence” to God for he understands the word as denoting
our own finite and temporal mode of being. Existence can, however,
be used to high-light the great paradox of the incarnation, whereby
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God made himself a man in a finite and temporal time-span. As for

God’s essence, according to Kierkegaard, he is not quite “wholly
heterogeneous” with reference to man, as Kant would have it. He
admits that man and God are somehow akin, that man derives
something from god and is totally dependent on him. As for what
differentiates the two, he settled, characteristically, on man’s
sinfulness, this being what separates man from his activity. (cf.
Fragments).

The Prophet
A telling extract form Kierkegaard’s journal. 1853, reads, “I have
something upon my conscience as a writer. Let me indicate precisely
how I feel about it. There is something quite definite I have to say,
and I have it so much upon my conscience that (as I feel) I dare not
die without having uttered it. For the instant I die… the question will
be put to me: ‘hast thou uttered the definite message quite
definitely?’ and if I have not done so, what then?” several entries in
the journals and a whole spate of attacks on the contemporary
religious establishment make it clear that Kierkegaard was sincerely
convinced that god has called him, as another Jeremiah, to launch a
scathing attack on the compromising, fawning attitudes of the local
Christian church. As he put it later in the same journal, “let us collect
all the New Testaments we have, let us bring them out to an open
square or up to the summit of a mountain, and, while we all kneel, let
one man speak to god thus: take this book back again; we men, such
as we are, are not fit to go in for this sort of thing, it only makes us
unhappy. ‘This is my proposal, that like those inhabitants in Gesara
we beseech Christ to depart from our borders. This would be an
honest and human way of talking – rather different from the
disgusting hypocritical priestly fudge about life having no value for
us without this priceless blessing which is Christianity.”

What has gone wrong?

One of Kierkegaard’s tracts is aptly titled, “we are all Christians-
without having so much a suspicion what Christianity is.” And then
he explains how he understands it: ‘God wants to be love. Therefore
he wants Christians. To love god is to be a Christian…. Now man’s
knavish interest consists in creating millions and millions of
Christians, the more the better, all men if possible; for thus the whole
 17

difficulty of being a Christian vanishes, being a Christian and being a

mere man amounts to the same thing, and we find ourselves where
paganism ended. Christendom has mocked god and continues to
mock him- just as if to a man who is a lover of nuts, instead of
bringing him one nut with a kernel, we have to bring him tons and
millions of… empty nuts, and then make this show of our zeal to
comply with his wish.”

The villain of the piece

There is no doubt that, for Kierkegaard, the main fault for all this is
to be laid at the door of the clergy. As he puts it in one of his more
scathing passages: “just as if one of the composers who compose
variations upon one or more movements of a funeral march were to
take occasion to compose with free poetic license a dashing gallop, so
has the official Christianity taken occasion from some sentences in
the new testament (this doctrine of a cross and anguish and horror
and shuddering before eternity) to compose with free poetic license a
lovely idyl, with procreating of children and waltzes. Where
everything is ‘so joyful, so joyful, so joyful,’ where the priest (a kind
of leader of the town band) is willing, for money, to let Christianity
(the doctrine of dying unto the world) furnish music for weddings
and christening, where everything is joy and mirth in this (according
to the teaching of Christianity) a vale of tears and a penitentiary, this
glorious world (yea, according to the new testament it is a time to
probation related to accounting and judgment), a foretaste of the still
more joyful eternity which the priest guarantees to those families
which by their devotion to him have evinced a sense for the eternal.”
Or to quote some of the short, pointed barbs from his periodical the
instant, “is this the same teaching, when Christ says to the rich young
man, ‘sell all that thou hast, and give it to me?’” “One cannot live off
of nothing. This one hears so often, especially from priests. And
precisely the priest performs this trick: Christianity does not exist—
yet they live off of it.”

PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

In the world, not of it
Kierkegaard is primarily a religious thinker and a Christian religious
thinker, at that. This means that, like any committed Christian, he
accepts the reality of the world as being God’s creation and the
 18

theatre in which man must live out his commitments. However, as in

the traditional Christian view, the world is viewed as more a danger
to man’ spiritual growth, rather than anything else. It is a testing-
ground of his mighty vocation. But he is born for grater things. Not
that Christianity is “indifferent to anything secular, on the contrary,
it is solely spiritually concerned for everything, (works of love) in
short, Kierkegaard’s “philosophy of the world” is to be extracted from
the implicit views expressed in his writings which are more
pronouncedly theological and human in import. And his philosophy
of the world can be best summed up in the traditional understanding
of the biblical phrase that man is “in the world, but not of it.” That is,
the world is real and it is man’s unavoidable environment, but it is
not to be taken too seriously else man’s goal and destiny will undergo
shipwreck. Many a contemporary Christian theologian may, with
reason, have reservations about such a simplistic exegesis of St.
John’s famous verse. But this is how very many committed
Christians- Kierkegaard included-would understand it.

II. MARTIN BUBER (1878—1965)

He was a prominent twentieth century philosopher, religious thinker,

political activist and educator. Born in Austria, he spent most of his
life in Germany and Israel, writing in German and Hebrew. He is
best known for his 1923 book, Ich und Du (I and Thou), which
distinguishes between “I-Thou” and “I-It” modes of existence. Often
characterized as an existentialist philosopher, Buber rejected the
label, contrasting his emphasis on the whole person and “dialogic”
intersubjectivity with existentialist emphasis on “monologic” self-
consciousness. In his later essays, he defines man as the being who
faces an “other” and constructs a world from the dual acts of
distancing and relating. His writing challenges Kant, Hegel, Marx,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel and Heidegger, and he
influenced Emmanuel Lévinas. On June 13, 1965 Martin Buber died.
The leading Jewish political figures of the time attended his funeral.
Classes were cancelled and hundreds of students lined up to say
goodbye as Buber was buried in the Har-Hamenuchot cemetery in
Jerusalem.
 19

Philosophical Anthropology
Martin Buber’s major philosophic works in English are the widely
read I and Thou (1923), a collection of essays from the 1920s and 30s
published as Between Man and Man, a collection of essays from the
1950s published as The Knowledge of Man: Selected
Essays and Good and Evil: Two Interpretations (1952). For many
thinkers Buber is the philosopher of I and Thou and he himself often
suggested one begin with that text. However, his later essays
articulate a complex and worthy philosophical anthropology.

Buber called himself a “philosophical anthropologist” in his 1938

inaugural lectures as Professor of Social Philosophy at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, entitled “What is Man?” (in Between Man
and Man). He states that he is explicitly responding to Kant’s
question “What is man?” and acknowledges in his biographic
writings that he has never fully shaken off Kant’s influence. But while
Buber finds certain similarities between his thought and Kant’s,
particularly in ethics, he explains in “Elements of the Interhuman”
(in The Knowledge of Man, 1957) that their origin and goal differ.
The origin for Buber is always lived experience, which means
something personal, affective, corporeal and unique, and embedded
in a world, in history and in sociality. The goal is to study the
wholeness of man, especially that which has been overlooked or
remains hidden. As an anthropologist he wants to observe and
investigate human life and experience as it is lived, beginning with
one’s own particular experience; as a philosophic anthropologist he
wants to make these particular experiences that elude the
universality of language understood. Any comprehensive overview of
Buber’s philosophy is hampered by his disdain for systemization.
Buber stated that ideologization was the worst thing that could
happen to his philosophy and never argued for the objectivity of his
concepts. Knowing only the reality of his own experience, he
appealed to others who had analogous experiences.

Buber begins these lectures by asserting that man only becomes a

problem to himself and asks “What is man?” in periods of social and
cosmic homelessness. Targeting Kant and Hegel, he argues that
while this questioning begins in solitude, in order for man to find
who he is, he must overcome solitude and the whole way of
 20

conceiving of knowledge and reality that is based on solitude. Buber

accuses Hegel of denigrating the concrete human person and
community in favor of universal reason and argues that man will
never be at home or overcome his solitude in the universe that Hegel
postulates. With its emphasis on history, Hegel locates perfection in
time rather than in space. This type of future-oriented perfection,
Buber argues, can be thought, but it cannot be imagined, felt or lived.
Our relationship to this type of perfection can only rest on faith in a
guarantor for the future.

Instead, Buber locates realization in relations between creatures.

Overcoming our solitude, which tends to oscillate between
conceiving of the self as absorbed in the all (collectivism) and the all
as absorbed into the self (solipsistic mysticism), we realize that we
always exist in the presence of other selves, and that the self is a part
of reality only insofar as it is relational. In contrast to the traditional
philosophic answers to “What is man?” that fixate on reason, self-
consciousness or free will, Buber argues that man is the being who
faces an “other”, and a human home is built from relations of mutual
confirmation.

b. “I-Thou” and “I-It”

Martin Buber’s most influential philosophic work, I and Thou (1923),
is based on a distinction between two word-pairs that designate two
basic modes of existence: I-Thou” (Ich-Du) and “I-It” (Ich-Es). The
“I-Thou” relation is the pure encounter of one whole unique entity
with another in such a way that the other is known without being
subsumed under a universal. Not yet subject to  classification or
limitation, the “Thou” is not reducible to spatial or temporal
characteristics. In contrast to this the “I-It” relation is driven by
categories of “same” and “different” and focuses on universal
definition. An “I-It” relation experiences a detached thing, fixed in
space and time, while an “I-Thou” relation participates in the
dynamic, living process of an “other”.

Buber characterizes “I-Thou” relations as “dialogical” and “I-It”

relations as “monological.” In his 1929 essay “Dialogue,” Buber
explains that monologue is not just a turning away from the other
but also a turning back on oneself (Rückbiegung). To perceive the
 21

other as an It is to take them as a classified and hence predictable

and manipulable object that exists only as a part of one’s own
experiences. In contrast, in an “I-Thou” relation both participants
exist as polarities of relation, whose center lies in the between
(Zwischen).

The “I” of man differs in both modes of existence. The “I” may be
taken as the sum of its inherent attributes and acts, or it may be
taken as a unitary, whole, irreducible being. The “I” of the “I-It”
relation is a self-enclosed, solitary individual (der Einzige) that takes
itself as the subject of experience. The “I” of the “I-Thou” relation is a
whole, focused, single person (der Einzelne) that knows itself
as subject. In later writings Buber clarified that inner life is not
exhausted by these two modes of being. However, when man
presents himself to the world he takes up one of them.

While each of us is born an individual, Buber draws on the

Aristotelian notion of entelechy, or innate self-realization, to argue
that the development of this individuality, or sheer difference, into a
whole personality, or fulfilled difference, is an ongoing achievement
that must be constantly maintained. In I and Thou, Buber explains
that the self becomes either more fragmentary or more unified
through its relationships to others. This emphasis on
intersubjectivity is the main difference between I and Thou and
Buber’s earlier Daniel: Dialogues on Realization (1913). Like I and
Thou, Daniel distinguishes between two modes of existence:
orienting (Rientierung), which is a scientific grasp of the world that
links experiences, and realization (Verwirklichung), which is
immersion in experience that leads to a state of wholeness. While
these foreshadow the “I-It” and “I-Thou” modes, neither expresses a
relationship to a real “other”. In I and Thou man becomes whole not
in relation to himself but only through a relation to another self. The
formation of the “I” of the “I-Thou” relation takes place in a
dialogical relationship in which each partner is both active and
passive and each is affirmed as a whole being. Only in this
relationship is the other truly an “other”, and only in this encounter
can the “I” develop as a whole being.
 22

Buber identifies three spheres of dialogue, or “I Thou” relations,

which correspond to three types of otherness. We exchange in
language, broadly conceived, with man, transmit below language
with nature, and receive above language with spirit. Socrates is
offered as the paradigmatic figure of dialogue with man, Goethe, of
dialogue with nature, and Jesus, of dialogue with spirit. That we
enter into dialogue with man is easily seen; that we also enter into
dialogue with nature and spirit is less obvious and the most
controversial and misunderstood aspect of I and Thou. However, if
we focus on the “I-Thou” relationship as a meeting of singularities,
we can see that if we truly enter into relation with a tree or cat, for
instance, we apprehend it not as a thing with certain attributes,
presenting itself as a concept to be dissected, but as a singular being,
one whole confronting another.

Dialogue with spirit is the most difficult to explicate because Buber

uses several different images for it. At times he describes dialogue
with spirit as dialogue with the “eternal Thou,” which he sometimes
calls God, which  is eternally “other”. Because of this, I and Thou was
widely embraced by Protestant theologians, who also held the notion
that no intermediary was necessary for religious knowledge. Buber
also argues that the precondition for a dialogic community is that
each member be in a perpetual relation to a common center, or
“eternal Thou”. Here the “eternal Thou” represents the presence of
relationality as an eternal value. At other times, Buber describes
dialogue with spirit as the encounter with form that occurs in
moments of artistic inspiration or the encounter with personality
that occurs in intensive engagement with another thinker’s works.
Spiritual address is that which calls us to transcend our present state
of being through creative action. The eternal form can either be an
image of the self one feels called to become or some object or deed
that one feels called to bring into the world.

Besides worries over Buber’s description of man’s dialogue with

nature and spirit, three other main complaints have been raised
against I and Thou. The first, mentioned by Walter Kaufmann in the
introduction to his translation of I and Thou, is that the language is
overly obscure and romantic, so that there is a risk that the reader
will be aesthetically swept along into thinking the text is more
 23

profound than it actually is. Buber acknowledges that the text was
written in a state of inspiration. For this reason it is especially
important to also read his later essays, which are more clearly
written and rigorously argued. E. la B. Cherbonnier notes in
“Interrogation of Martin Buber” that every objective criticism of
Buber’s philosophy would belong, by definition, to the realm of “I-It”.
Given the incommensurability of the two modes, this means no
objective criticism of the “I-Thou” mode is possible. In his response
Buber explains that he is concerned to avoid internal contradiction
and welcomes criticism. However, he acknowledges that his
intention was not to create an objective philosophic system but to
communicate an experience.

Finally, I and Thou is often criticized for denigrating philosophic and

scientific knowledge by elevating “I-Thou” encounters above “I-It”
encounters. It is important to note that Buber by no means
renounces the usefulness and necessity of “I-It” modes. His point is
rather to investigate what it is to be a person and what modes of
activity further the development of the person. Though one is only
truly human to the extent one is capable of “I-Thou” relationships,
the “It” world allows us to classify, function and navigate. It gives us
all scientific knowledge and is indispensable for life. There is a
graduated structure of “I-It” relations as they approximate an “I-
Thou” relationship, but the “I-Thou” remains contrasted to even the
highest stage of an “I-It” relation, which still contains some
objectification. However, each “Thou” must sometimes turn into an
“It”, for in responding to an “other” we bind it to
representation. Even the “eternal Thou” is turned into an It for us
when religion, ethics and art become fixed and mechanical. However,
an “I-It” relation can be constituted in such a way as to leave open
the possibility of further “I-Thou” encounters, or so as to close off
that possibility.

c. Distance and Relation

In I and Thou Martin Buber discusses the a priori basis of the
relation, presenting the “I-Thou” encounter as the more primordial
one, both in the life of humans, as when an infant reaches for its
mother, and in the life of a culture, as seen in relationships in
 24

primitive cultures. However, in the 1951 essay “Distance and

Relation,” written in the midst of the Palestinian conflicts, he
explains that while this may be true from an anthropological
perspective, from an ontological one it must be said that distance
(Urdistanz) is the precondition for the emergence of relation
(Beziehung), whether “I-Thou” or “I-It”. Primal distance sets up the
possibility of these two basic word pairs, and the between (Zwischen)
emerges out of them. Humans find themselves primally distanced
and differentiated; it is our choice to then thin or thicken the
distance by entering into an “I-Thou” relation with an “other” or
withdrawing into an “I-It” mode of existence.

Only man truly distances, Buber argues, and hence only man has a
“world.” Man is the being through whose existence what “is” becomes
recognized for itself. Animals respond to the other only as embedded
within their own experience, but even when faced with an enemy,
man is capable of seeing his enemy as a being with similar emotions
and motivations. Even if these are unknown , we are able to
recognize that these unknown qualities of the other are “real” while
our fantasies about the other are not. Setting at a distance is hence
not the consequence of a reflective, “It” attitude, but the precondition
for all human encounters with the world, including reflection.

Buber argues that every stage of the spirit, however primal, wishes to
form and express itself. Form assumes communication with an
interlocutor who will recognize and share in the form one has made.
Distance and relation mutually correspond because in order for the
world to be grasped as a whole by a person, it must be distanced and
independent from him and yet also include him, and his attitude,
perception, and relation to it. Consequently, one cannot truly have a
world unless one receives confirmation of one’s own substantial and
independent identity in one’s relations with others.

Relation presupposes distance, but distance can occur without

genuine relation. Buber explains that distance is the universal
situation of our existence; relation is personal becoming in the
situation. Relation presupposes a genuine other and only man sees
the other as other. This other withstands and confirms the self and
hence meets our primal instinct for relation. Just as we have the
 25

instinct to name, differentiate, and make independent a lasting and

substantial world, we also have the instinct to relate to what we have
made independent. Only man truly relates, and when we move away
from relation we give up our specifically human status.

d. Confirmation and Inclusion

Confirmation is a central theme of Martin Buber’s philosophic texts
as well as his articles on education and politics. Buber argues that,
while animals sometimes turn to humans in a declaring or
announcing mode, they do not need to be told that they are what they
are and do not see whom they address as an existence independent of
their own experience. But because man experiences himself as
indeterminate, his actualization of one possibility over another needs
confirmation. In confirmation one meets, chooses and recognizes the
other as a subject with the capacity to actualize one’s own potential.
In order for confirmation to be complete one must know that he is
being made present to the other.

As becomes clear in his articles on education, confirmation is not the

same as acceptance or unconditional affirmation of everything the
other says or does. Since we are not born completely focused and
differentiated and must struggle to achieve a unified personality,
sometimes we have to help an “other” to actualize themselves against
their own immediate inclination. In these cases confirmation denotes
a grasp of the latent unity of the other and confirmation of what the
other can become. Nor does confirmation imply that a dialogic or “I-
Thou” relation must always be fully mutual. Helping relations, such
as educating or healing, are necessarily asymmetrical.

In the course of his writing Buber uses various terms, such as

“embrace” or “inclusion” (Umfassung), “imagining the real”
(Realphantasie), and in reference to Kant, “synthesizing
apperception,” to describe the grasp of the other that is necessary for
confirmation and that occurs in an “I-Thou” relation. “Imagining the
real” is a capacity; “making present” is an event, the highest
expression of this capacity in a genuine meeting of two persons. This
form of knowledge is not the subsumption of the particularity of the
other under a universal category. When one embraces the pain of
another, this is not a sense of what pain is in general, but knowledge
 26

of this specific pain of this specific person. Nor is this identification

with them, since the pain always remains their own specific pain.
Buber differentiates inclusion from empathy. In empathy one’s own
concrete personality and situation is lost in aesthetic absorption in
the other. In contrast, through inclusion, one person lives through a
common event from the standpoint of another person, without giving
up their own point of view.

e. Good and Evil

Martin Buber’s 1952 Good and Evil: Two Interpretations answers
the question “What is man?” in a slightly different way than the
essays in Between Man and Man and The Knowledge of Man.
Rather than focusing on relation, Good and Evil: Two
Interpretations emphasizes man’s experience of possibility and
struggle to become actualized. Framing his discussion around an
analysis of psalms and Zoroastrian and Biblical myths, Buber
interprets the language of sin, judgment and atonement in purely
existential terms that are influenced by Hasidic Judaism, Kant’s
analysis of caprice (Willkür) and focused will (Wille), and
Kierkegaard’s discussion of anxiety. Buber argues that good and evil
are not two poles of the same continuum, but rather direction
(Richtung) and absence of direction, or vortex (Wirbel). Evil is a
formless, chaotic swirling of potentiality; in the life of man it is
experienced as endless possibility pulling in all directions. Good is
that which forms and determines this possibility, limiting it into a
particular direction. We manifest the good to the extent we become a
singular being with a singular direction.

Buber explains that imagination is the source of both good and evil.
The “evil urge” in the imagination generates endless possibilities.
This is fundamental and necessary, and only becomes “evil” when it
is completely separated from direction. Man’s task is not to eradicate
the evil urge, but to reunite it with the good, and become a whole
being. The first stage of evil is “sin,” occasional directionlessness.
Endless possibility can be overwhelming, leading man to grasp at
anything, distracting and busying himself, in order to not have to
make a real, committed choice. The second stage of evil is
“wickedness,” when caprice is embraced as a deformed substitute for
genuine will and becomes characteristic. If occasional caprice is sin,
 27

and embraced caprice is wickedness, creative power in conjunction

with will is wholeness. The “good urge” in the imagination limits
possibility by saying no to manifold possibility and directing passion
in order to decisively realize potentiality. In so doing it redeems evil
by transforming it from anxious possibility into creativity. Because of
the temptation of possibility, one is not whole or good once and for
all. Rather, this is an achievement that must be constantly
accomplished.

Buber interprets the claim that in the end the good are rewarded and
the bad punished as the experience the bad have of their own
fragmentation, insubstantiality and “non-existence.” Arguing that
evil can never be done with the whole being, but only out of inner
contradiction, Buber states that the lie or divided spirit is the specific
evil that man has introduced into nature. Here “lie” denotes a self
that evades itself, as manifested not just in a gap between will and
action, but more fundamentally, between will and will. Similarly,
“truth” is not possessed but is rather lived in the person who affirms
his or her particular self by choosing direction. This process, Buber
argues, is guided by the presentiment implanted in each of us of who
we are meant to become.

f. Hindrances to Dialogue
Along with the evasion of responsibility and refusal to direct one’s
possibilities described in Good and Evil: Two
Interpretations (1952), Buber argues in “Elements of the
Interhuman” (1957, in The Knowledge of Man) that the main
obstacle to dialogue is the duality of “being” (Sein) and “seeming”
(Schein). Seeming is the essential cowardice of man, the lying that
frequently occurs in self-presentation when one seeks to
communicate an image and make a certain impression. The fullest
manifestation of this is found in the propagandist, who tries to
impose his own reality upon others. Corresponding to this is the rise
of “existential mistrust” described in Buber’s 1952 address at
Carnegie Hall, “Hope for this Hour” (in Pointing the Way). Mistrust
takes it for granted that the other dissembles, so that rather than
genuine meeting, conversation becomes a game of unmasking and
uncovering unconscious motives. Buber criticizes Marx, Nietzsche
and Freud for meeting the other with suspicion and perceiving the
 28

truth of the other as mere ideology. Similarly, in his acceptance

speech for the 1953 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, “Genuine
Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace” (in Pointing the Way), Buber
argues the precondition for peace is dialogue, which in turn rests on
trust. In mistrust one presupposes that the other is likewise filled
with mistrust, leading to a dangerous reserve and lack of candor.

As it is a key component of his philosophic anthropology that one

becomes a unified self through relations with others, Buber was also
quite critical of psychiatrist Carl Jung and the philosophers of
existence. He argued that subsuming reality under psychological
categories cuts man off from relations and does not treat the whole
person, and especially objected to Jung’s reduction of psychic
phenomenon to categories of the private unconscious. Despite his
criticisms of Freud and Jung, Buber was intensely interested in
psychiatry and gave a series of lectures at the Washington School of
Psychiatry at the request of Leslie H. Farber (1957, in The
Knowledge of Man) and engaged in a public dialogue with Carl
Rogers at the University of Michigan (see Anderson and Cissna’s The
Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogue: A New Transcript With
Commentary). In these lectures, as well as his 1951 introduction to
Hans Trüb’s Heilungaus der Begegnung (in English as “Healing
Through Meeting” in Pointing the Way), Buber criticizes the
tendency of psychology to “resolve” guilt without addressing the
damaged relations at the root of the feeling. In addition to Farber,
Rogers and Trüb, Buber’s dialogical approach to healing influenced a
number of psychologists and psychoanalysts, including Viktor von
Weizsäcker, Ludwig Binswanger and ArieSborowitz.

Often labeled an existentialist, Buber rejected the association. He

asserted that while his philosophy of dialogue presupposes existence,
he knew of no philosophy of existence that truly overcomes solitude
and lets in otherness far enough. Sartre in particular makes self-
consciousness his starting point. But in an “I-Thou” relation one does
not have a split self, a moment of both experience and self-reflection.
Indeed, self-consciousness is one of the main barriers to spontaneous
meeting. Buber explains the inability to grasp otherness as
perceptual inadequacy that is fostered as a defensive mechanism in
an attempt to not be held responsible to what is addressing one. Only
 29

when the other is accorded reality are we held accountable to him;

only when we accord ourselves a genuine existence are we held
accountable to ourselves. Both are necessary for dialogue, and both
require courageous confirmation of oneself and the other.

In Buber's examples of non-dialogue, the twin modes of distance and

relation lose balance and connectivity, and one pole overshadows the
other, collapsing the distinction between them. For example,
mysticism (absorption in the all) turns into narcissism (a retreat into
myself), and collectivism (absorption in the crowd) turns into lack of
engagement with individuals (a retreat into individualism). Buber
identifies this same error in Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy. While
Lévinas acknowledged Buber as one of his main influences, the two
had a series of exchanges, documented in Levinas & Buber:
Dialogue and Difference, in which Buber argued that Lévinas had
misunderstood and misapplied his philosophy. In Buber’s notion of
subject formation, the self is always related to and responding to an
“other”. But when Lévinas embraces otherness, he renders the other
transcendent, so that the self always struggles to reach out to and
adequately respond to an infinite other. This throws the self back
into the attitude of solitude that Buber sought to escape.

III. GABRIEL MARCEL (1889-1973)

1. MARCEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

1.1 Concrete Approaches
We have seen howMarcelentitled one of his earliestphilosophical
ventures (in the original French): “statement of and concrete
approaches to the ontological mystery. “Now that little phrase
“concrete approaches” is important: it defines very succinctly what,
for him, is the role of method and system in philosophy. His aim is to
“approach” reality in the “concrete” and arrive at some general
interpretation of reality. Various “concrete approaches” he will try.
They will, hopefully, converge and, through their interplay, throw
into focus some existential fat bound up with experience. This, rather
than a series of theses that can be buttressed by clear proofs is what
he aims to do in his philosophy. We can now understand how he
defines philosophy as “a certain way for experience to become aware
of and understand its own self.” (Creative Fidelity) in other words,
 30

for Marcel, the process of inquiry, in philosophy, is inseparable from

the conclusions we come to. There can be no true communication of
philosophical discoveries, which does not entail asking a person to
participate with one in the actual process of philosophizing. There is,
strictly speaking, no set of proved or verified results that we can take
from elsewhere and build upon. Indeed, “this perpetual beginning
again… is an inevitable apt of all genuinely philosophical work.” (The
Philosophy of Existence).

1.2 Problem and Mystery

This well-known distinction of Marcel is the key to his whole
philosophical development. After all, in his own words, metaphysics
is essentially a “reflection bearing on a mystery.” To speak of
ontology as a problem is an abuse of language, which, in the last
analysis invalidates the whole process of philosophizing, itself.
Hence, this is no mere academic difference. “A problem is something
that we come up against, which bars our path. It is wholly and
entirely outside of me.” Its data lie ob-jectively before me, in the
etymological sense of the word. “It is something against which the
mind comes to a halt an ones foot against as stone.” (All quotations
up to now are from Being and Having) it rises up at a given moment
in our research and the mind tries to overcome it by giving it a
solution. Indeed, the word solution is ideal for this situation. For as
soon as we face a problem, we set to work as if thought were an organ
of absorption, of solving (cf. The allied word dissolving). Thought
digests the problem, as it were, reduces and dissolves it into
thinkable matter and gets on with business as usual. The problem is
no longer there to block the path.

1.3 Mystery
And then, one fine day, the mind comes up against not this or that
aspect of being but being itself- being as being, as Aristotle would
say. The temptation, of course, is to make use of the same technique
of reduction: to envelop being, to surround it, to gaze upon it, to
decompose it into abstractelements and to categorize these according
to various logical heads “valid” for “thought in general”. Putting the
same thing in other words, we could say that
“problematisation”consists of making an irreducible opposition
between subject and object, between “the in me and the before me”,
 31

between “the spectator and the spectacle”, (Being and Having).

However, beings are not one of the things that we can rightly treat
like this. Since I am being, too, when I ask the question of being, I am
asking a question about myself. “We are involved in being, it doesn’t
depend on us to pull out of it: more simply, we are, it’s all a question
of knowing how to situate ourselves with regard to full reality. This is
the ontological mystery: recognizing that we can never stand apart
from being to question it; the question of being – the fundamental
question in philosophy – is a question in which we are involved.

2. MARCEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF MAN

2.1 Being in a situation
The fundamental human condition is to be in a situation. This is also
the answer to the basic question, “what am I?” or “what does it mean
to be a person?” this “situation” is basically the world, the spatio-
temporal reality that surrounds me. The primary datum, them, is not
the self-enclosed ego but myself in the world, present in a situation,
participation in Being and open to Being. This insertion
intothecosmos is through my body. Through my body I am
“incarnated” into the world. My relation to my body is, thus,
mysterious. Neither statement does justice to the facts – neither “I
have a body’, nor “I am a body”. It is a unique type of relationship: it
can be properly compared or likened to none other.

2.2 Inter-subjectivity
However, through my body, I am not open to the physical cosmos
only. As a human person, I am essentially open to the “other”: to
other human persons. But my relation to other persons can be of two
types. First, I can look upon “the other” as a mere object, an
instrument for my self-gratification – such as when, in a “broken
world”, I judge a person in terms of his functions and use him for my
benefit in that regard, nothing more. This happenswhen I treat a bus-
conductor as a bus-conductor and no more, never thinking of him as
person or respecting him so. But I can also view a person as a subject
– not an “it” or a “he” or a “she” (i.e., in effect, as an object) but as a
thou (French, tu, Germen Du). Here we are relating, as subjects: we
are on the plane of intersubjectivity. At this level I experience
disposability (deponibilite, making oneself available, as a person, for
another). At the interpersonal, intersubjective level, participation in
 32

Being, is elevated to the level of person communication and

communion.

3. MARCEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF GOD

3.1 The impossibility of proofs
God’s existence cannot be proved, maintains Marcel. For this would,
in effect, make him somehow dependent on postulates or certain
facts on which proofs or verifications would be founded. Which is to
make him an object among other objects, however powerful and
superior we may claim him to be. Every proof “implies the
suppression of the divine as such… that whose existence could be
proved would not – and could not – be God.” (Metaphysical journal)
there is no logical passage which permits us to raiseourselves up to
him from what is not him. That is why “when we speak of God, we
should take carful notethat it is not God which we indentify” (ibid.) –
this is because language is made to symbolize objects and God is no
object. Proofs for God’s existence are of no use to somehow who
doesn’t have faith; they can, at most, have confirmatory value for one
who believes.

3.2 The possibility of encountering God

Man, as we have seen has openness – nay, an exigency – for Being.
In religious language we could say that man has orientation, to the
Absolute Thou. Now there are various “concrete approaches”
whereby this orientation can be appropriated and along which God
can be “discovered” or “encountered”. One way is in and through my
interpersonal human relationships. In and through such experiences
I discover an exigency that goes beyond the finite and the
conditionedtowards the infinite and unconditioned: I aspire to
absolute self-commitment and absolute loyalty. And I gradually
discover an Absolute Thou who is the found of all being and value
and makes eternal fidelity possible. One makes such a discovery, for
instances, at the moment of the deathof a loved one. Science gives no
assurance of her continued existence or of a possible reunion. But
thereishope (of which more later), which, together with love, assures
us of the loved ones continued existence andof our eventual reunion.
This is not, for Marcel, mere wishful thinking but the encounter with
a mysterious presence – God – which is this guarantee and ground.
Another concrete approach is that of worship and prayer: here, too,
 33

man can discover and encounter God. But, one can refuse to, also.
It’s a question of deponibilite: as in any possible intersubjective
relationship, it’s up to me. I can make myself available to “the other”
as a person, or I can prefer to remain within the limits of my egoism
– I can prefer to be un-available.

3.3 Recuperating a lost unity.

The idea of recuperating a lost unity – as we have seen, in the case of
the experience of separation in death, followed by the conviction of
reunion – is not doubt inspired by Marcel’s idealistic phase. But it
cannot be reduced to it for some; this is but a case of “wishful
thinking”. But not for Marcel, not for the one who follows him in ht
process of reflection. There one discovers, through a “concrete
approach” that death only breaks a physical bond. On the
metaphysical plane the bond persists for “creative fidelity” which is
“the active perpetuation of presence”. Hope, then, for Marcel is a
metaphysical reality and an act: it involves transcending empirical
evidence. “Hope is not a kind of listless waiting; it underpins action
or it runs before it… hope is, as it were, the prolongation into the
unknown of an activity which is central – that is to say, rooted in
being.” (The Philosophy of Existence) here, too, we recognize the
context of two other key nations in Marcel: refusal and invocation.
Let us not forget that the original French title of the volume creative
fidelity, is from refusal to invocation. It is possible for me to shut God
out in my concrete approach to intersubjectivity. Refusal or
invocation is for me an option, in actof the will. Freedom –
Deponibilite hope – refusal – invocation: these are all theological
attitudes rooted in the ontological mystery!
IV. KARL JASPERS (1883–1969)

Jaspers began his academic career working as a psychiatrist and,

after a period of transition, he converted to philosophy in the early
1920s. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century he
exercised considerable influence on a number of areas of
philosophical inquiry: especially on epistemology, the philosophy of
religion, and political theory. His philosophy has its foundation in a
subjective-experiential transformation of Kantian philosophy, which
reconstructs Kantian transcendentalism as a doctrine of particular
experience and spontaneous freedom, and emphasizes the
 34

constitutive importance of lived existence for authentic knowledge.

Jaspers obtained his widest influence, not through his philosophy,
but through his writings on governmental conditions in Germany,
and after the collapse of National Socialist regime he emerged as a
powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education and
reorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Despite his importance in the evolution of both philosophy and

political theory in twentieth-century Germany, today Jaspers is a
neglected thinker. He did not found a particular philosophical
school, he did not attract a cohort of apostles, and, outside Germany
at least, his works are not often the subject of high philosophical
discussion. This is partly the result of the fact that the philosophers
who now enjoy undisputed dominance in modern German
philosophical history, especially Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács
and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote disparagingly about Jaspers, and
they were often unwilling to take his work entirely seriously. To a
perhaps still greater extent, however, his relative marginality is due
to the fact that he is associated with the more prosaic periods of
German political life, and his name is tarred with an aura of staid
bourgeois common sense. Nonetheless, Jaspers' work set the
parameters for a number of different philosophical debates, the
consequences of which remain deeply influential in contemporary
philosophy, and in recent years there have been signs that a more
favourable reconstructive approach to his work is beginning to
prevail.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

On beings and Being
In his preface to the fist volume of philosophy, jaspers remarks, “the
philosophy of the present day is, like that of former times, concerned
with Being.” Tow important observations are implied thereby, Jasper
is stressing the sense of continuity that underlines the multifarious
approach in man’s quest for wisdom down the ages. Secondly it is a
solemn reminder to us as to what philosophy should be busy about.
Contrary, to what many of his contemporaries were thinking and
saying, philosophy is not to be reduced to the study of the history of
 35

human thought. Nor is it, under pressure from our scientific age to
be now made a kind of handmaid of science: providing and analyzing
the basic scientific concepts. Nor are we justified by making
philosophy into the study of this or that existent, a being chosen out
of the many. Indeed, this is what often happens. Consciously or
unconsciously, philosophy settles down to be the study of a being.
Either we imagine that we are studying Being while we are treating of
the alleged sum total of existents under that name. But such a totality
is still a being and nothing more.

No “science” of Being
It is an understandable temptation for philosophy to try to prove its
worth by trying to make of itself a “science”. Understandable,
because we live in a technological age in which only that which is
“science” seems to command respect. And once again, there are not
lacking those who try to make philosophy a science among other
sciences, calling it the science of knowledge (epistemology and
nothing more) or the science of correct argumentation (logic) or
whatever. But- and here jaspers show his Kantian roots- philosophy
cannot be a science. And this also because Being cannot be
objectified, as science does to its subject matter. Once we objectify
Being we make it a being. Even the “totality of all that is”- which is
what some people image they study when they make philosophy a
“science”- ends up by reducing this totality to an instance to Being.
In any case such a “totality” is only an imaginary being:” it can never
by the “object” of a “science”. And, as japers never wearies of
reminding us, we never have an experience of pure Being, only of
beings which are, at most, particular manifestation of it.

Philosophy as “illumination” of Being

Philosophy, today, is none of all these above things. What, then, is it?
Rather than attempt the impossible – view being objectively and
theoretically “from the outside,” as it was- it seeks to awaken man’s
mind to the Being which transcended beings by “illuminating”
existence. The approach is to consider man as a free, self-
transcending subject, something that resists objectification and
reduction to the subject-matter of a science. Now if philosophy is
existenzerhellung (existence-illumination), then it should be no
cause for scandal that there is a multiplicity of conflicting systems
 36

such would be the case only if we grant that philosophy is a science.

If we grant that the true function of philosophy- or more specifically,
metaphysics-is to awaken man to Being which envelops him and in
which he and all other finite existents are grounded, the scope for
scandal should disappear! For ti should not surprise us that there be
different personal deciphering of the transcendent Being. All we have
to do is see these deciphering for what they are and not take the
extravagant claims of their authors’ too seriously. Their great value,
among other things, is that they “sever to push open, as it were, the
door which positivism would keep shut.” This last remark, of course,
has reference to the contribution of the great metaphysical systems,
of course.

Existenzand das umgreifende

These two German words have a special technical meaning in jaspers
and have, consequently been more or less taken over bodily into the
general existentialist vocabulary. So it would be useful now to sum
up their connotations. First, we retain the German existenz to avoid
confusing it with the individual existent or its particularized act of
existence, as for instance, the (act of) existence of my table, as
distinct form the (act of existence) of me or my pen. In jaspers own
words, existenz “is being a self suspended between itself and
transcendence form which it derives its beings and on which it is
based.” We see, then, that existenz applies par excellence to man. We
can link this with another favorite phrase of jaspers: man is more
than man.” He exists: is ever putting himself outsider of himself. As
for das umgreifende, translated as the comprehensive of the
encompassing (a more accurate rendering),, it refers to Being which
engulfs us and surrounds us from everywhere, through the various
existents which are its manifestations. Being, therefore, is never
encountered as something in its pure form standing before us: it is
encountered as an all – encompassing reality that surrounds us and
penetrates us (for we, too, are an expression of it).

PHILOSOPHY OF MAN
The “prophetic” philosopher
One of the great formative influence on the mind of jaspers was the
sociologist and economist, Max Weber, whom he hailed as “the last
genuine national German; genuine because he represented… not the
 37

will to power for one’s own empire- at any price and above all
others-, but the will to realize a spiritual and moral existence which
he holds its ground by power but also places this power itself under
its own conditions.” (Philosophical autobiography) no doubt Weber
inspired him in his development of the notion of “prophetic
philosophy” which he once briefly (and ambiguously) summed up as
“a substitute for religion.” This was a notion that the grim experience
of Nazi Germany brought out all the more, when youth deserted the
quest for truth to join the bullying gangs of Hitler Youth and
University professors let themselves become mere propaganda tools
for the Reich.

The idea was reaffirmed in the already sixties where the breakdown
of conventional religion left host of young people without religious
guides and prophets in their search for meaning. All these
developments emphasized the need for the philosopher to discharge
his eternal “prophetic” role, filling in the spiritual vacuum which
religion and its ministers could no longer respond to. The
philosopher, like another Max Weber, would have to awaken in man
“philosophical faith” (cf. below) from which spiritual values and
perhaps a new springtime for religion could be born. Above all, the
“prophetic philosopher” had the responsibility of reminding man of
that dimension of transcendence in his life; lead him to recognize its
possibility and, finally, make the leap of “philosophical faith” which it
invited.

The great “exceptions”

There are some great figures in history who were truly “exceptional”
men in the sense that they made us aware of the great possibilities
that opened out to man and which he has to choose from through the
responsible use of freedom. His projected three volumes work on
three great philosophers’ had, in effect, on other aim but to make us
aware of such personages, so that we could be challenged and
provoked by them to make our own soul-searching decision. Now we
can understand how men such as Jesus and the Buddha figure
among the lists of these “great philosophers.” They are, for jaspers,
purveyors of that “prophetic philosophy” of which we spoke above. In
 38

practice, however, their great “exceptional men,” the prophets, bore

witness to two great human possibilities, represented by Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche whom Jaspers did not hesitate to call “revelations;”
the tow fundamental alternatives that they confront us with are
Christianity and atheism – both of these understood in their most
radical sense.

Man as a possible existence

Man can be studied in various ways. As an object of scientific study,
he is something already made- a finished product- and so can be
classified according to various types by anthropologists,
psychologists, sociologists and son on. But seen by the
existenzphilosoph he is a free agent who makes himself. He does this
by realizing his manifold potentialities by free choice –obviously
some choices exclude others. Man is therefore always possible
existence (moglicheexistencz). Indeed, as we have seen, the word
Existenz is best applicable to man alone. Etymologically it means to
stand outside of oneself (ex-sistere); man, by his freedom, “puts
himself outside of himself” – he recognized potentialities, various
dimensions of development that are offered to him. Above all, there
is the dimension of theism (Christianity) or atheism, tow rival and
exclusive responded to the basic self - transcendence which he
cannot deny in his human experience. He may interpret this, as
Nietzsche did (atheism) or as Kierkegaard (committed Christianity).
But if he is looking for “proofs” to help him decide which to opt for,
he is going to be disappointed.

Philosophical faith
In jaspers elaboration of “philosophical faith” we can see the
influence of both Kant and Kierkegaard. I encounter transcendence
in the very act of encountering my limitedness. This, for instance, is
felt in moments of great crisis, such as the death of a loved one or in
a moment of failure. But from then on it is only a leap of
“philosophical faith” that can lead me further. The transcendent is to
be apprehended not by any proof, not even by a kind of mystical
experience- both of these would reduce it to a kind of object. This can
only be done by freely deciding to affirm it as my truth, in the
exercise of my liberty. It is called “philosophical” faith to distinguish
 39

it from the theological variety, which derives from the acceptance of

certain dogmas and doctrines. Here it is a question of a leap from the
“shipwreck” of human longings to the transcendent. On the other
hand, like Nietzsche, I may freely refuse to make that leap and
interpret transcendence ultimately in terms of some human
projection- a will to power, for instance, as the latter did.

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF GOD

Theist, yes. But Christian?
We have seen that “philosophical faith” is a leap involved in
affirming what can neither be proved nor disproved nor described.
That jaspers is definitely a theist can hardly be denied. Hide often
used the word “god,” but in his earlier writings it seemed to be but a
synonym for Das Umgreifande, the enveloping and comprehensive
Being in which e live and more and are. In his reply to my critics
(1957), written towards the end of his life, he tells us explicitly, “I
own up to a faith in god.” But he continues in a more confusing
manner. It is “a faith which on its part is historical and as such
cannot lay claim to universal validity; from which is deducible: a
human being cannot be god. I reject the witness of John (the
Baptist)”. Earlier he had referred to this witness in question, quoting
the evangelist john who wrote, “And the word became flesh… John
(the Baptist) was its witness.” As Fritz Kaufmann so rightly remarks,
“he (Jaspers) speaks of god rather in anonymous terms of
transcendence than in the personal confession of god the Father” –
which is characteristic of the convinced Christian.

The famous quotation from Von Der Wahrheit (1947) is well known:
“he (the one god) is the encompassing of all encompassing and (he)
aroused the deepest, absolute trust, he is the power… and the
greatest closeness which has its place within the inwardness of man.
He is providence, not fate; inscrutably he guides in inconceivable
judgment.” But he immediately adds, “But whatever is said about
him, is immediately also false.” This is understandable. For,
according to him, to speak of the transcendent is to objectify it and
this is to falsity it. That is why jaspers prefer to speak of the
“illuminating” function of philosophy, “showing” what cannot really
be “said”.
 40

V. MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976)

HEIDEGGER’S’ PHILOSOPHY OF BEING/THE WORLD

The language problem
A major hurdle in the study of Heidegger is his language. By this, of
course, id do not mean the mere fact that at he wrote in German.
Translations, whatever be their inherent insufficiency, are always
there to be consulted. But Heidegger does things with his native
language that even one of his fellow-countryman would find
disconcerting – as would the student who read the English, French
or whatever version. And, if it is true that running several words
together to make a single composite out of the whole mass is nothing
unusual in German, even a German speaker would find the original
of a sentence like “dasein-in world is before-between-beyond
consciousness-of-objects” rather baffling, to say the least. He also has
a propensity for twisting words out of the mould of their normal
usage as when he writers, for instance, die welt weltet (“the world
worlds”, using “world” as both noun and verb!). At other times he
pairs unheard of subject-predicate combinations, such as “things
think” and “blessings muses”. He will also summon up out-dated and
long-buried usages of words to make a pint, often anchoring them tin
questionable etymologies of the Greek roots of current German
words. For instance he will speak of truth as unforgetting, from the
Greek aletheia (which he traces back- questionably – to the primitive
a – and the root of to forget, supposedly the basis of lethia). Even his
close admires must admit the he does not make easy reading.

Hannah ardent, for one, dubbed him “the secret king of thought”.
For Coplestion, after wrestling with a particularly knotty issue in his
writings, once asked, “Does ambiguity belong to the essence of
Heidegger’s thought?” hence, we should go into this ticklish issue at
the outset. Why is Heidegger so difficult, so obscure? Is it plain
intellectual cussedness, an unnecessary over-mystification of things?
Or is there some deeper, inner necessity at work? On our response to
that question will depend very much the effort we are prepared to
put into breaking the heideggerian code!

A response
 41

The answer to this very real difficulty is to be sought in Heidegger’s

remarks that Nietzsche was the last great metaphysician of the west.
Now Nietzsche was of the opinion that the pre-Socratic periods of
early Greek philosophy was, contrary to the popular opinion, the
heyday of classical thinking, especially with regard to metaphysics.
Heidegger went on to pinot out that this was because the great pre-
Socratics, especially Parmenides, were really engaged in the study of
Being and not of begins. Indeed, as Heidegger never wearied to point
out, western-European thought, since the post-Socratic periods has
been characterized by a “forgetting” of Being in favour of beings.
True metaphysics should focus on the fact (or, better still, the act) of
existence and not on existents, concretely existing things.

The latter are instances of, manifestations of Being (existence) they

are not Being (existence itself). Heidegger’s charge is that western
metaphysics, since Plato and Aristotle (we could even say because of
them) began well, with the resolve to make an enquiry into existence.
But very soon its attention was distracted, it became enamored with
studying, analyzing and classifying individual exiting things (or even
God, the Supreme Existent) and forgetting that the original purpose
of quest was to focus on Being, existence! To correct this wrong
approach, to lead us back from this misleading path and enable us to
find a true path into the very heart of Being, we cannot but break
with conventional usages of words (very specially metaphysical
terms), for all these have been shot through with connotations of a
“forgetfulness of Being”. We have to twist them out of their
conventional moulds so as to get them to do the original job we ahs
set out to do. We must try to make the words of our modern
languages do for us what- rightly or wrongly – Heidegger believed
the Greek language was able to do for the ancients, bring them
“directly into the presence of the thing itself (i.e. The thing spoken
about), not first into the presence of the mere word-sign (of it).”

The “paths”, “traits” and “clearings” of Heidegger’s

Methodology
Heidegger grew up not far from the heart of the black Forrest and
ever retained a deep love and “feel” for the earth and soil of his native
place. We remember how he rather forfeited lucrative posts in
distant university cities than quit his beloved Grund. This love is
 42

mirrored in the idioms with which he wrote of his philosophical

quest. We can illustrate this with reference to one of his more well-
known and later lectures, the bi-lingual English version of which
came out in 1958, three years after the original. In English, the title is
rendered, “what is philosophy?” but in the original German it runs,
“Was ist das – die Philsophie?” The stress in the German is not upon
the thing to be studied, but upon the act of asking the question: What
does asking, ‘What is Philosophy’ imply? That would be a more
accurate version of the title.

We have to find a way (Weg) which will enable us to go deep into, or

explore, this question. We must find a way, for there are several
possible paths we might take to penetrate it. However, just as when
we seek to explore a forest, we must look for, if not forge a path that
will neither skirt the forest nor merely go straight through it but keep
us circling within it, so with the question under study. The important
thing is to explore the question, experience its implication, ‘take it
in’, as it were. We must needs find a path that keeps us “moving
within philosophy, and not outside of it or around it”.

Invariably, to maintain the imagery, we should not seek out the big,
well-frequented highways: they tend to circle the forest or take the
quickest route through it. They are not interested in exploring the
forest but merely in moving through it and get on to some pace else
considered more important. What we should look for is the
“woodman’s path” (Holzweg). Such paths are made by men who are
interested in the forest. They invariably lead to the very heart of all,
to a clearing (Lichtung). Thence we can follow up other such paths –
wegmarken (road-markers), Unterwege (approacahes), Feldwege
(paths across the field) – invariably in circular, exploratory
movements. These are paths not familiar to the usual run of travelers
and so will seem unusual and odd. This explains the “oddness” of the
language Heidegger will use. Traditional language and approaches,
according to him, but skirt the issue or hurry through it. They aren’t
geared to exploring, going deeper into.

Heidegger’s “etymological realism”

Let us follow through Heidegger’s 1955 lecture to explain what is
meant by this. Many people start philosophizing with a question –
 43

Socrates and the great pre-Socratics included. The path chosen by

them (as well as traditional philosophy) thereafter is to suggest a
rough definition and strike out, calling this definition into question,
radically revising it, or even rejecting it altogether in the light of what
is found. This is not Heidegger’s “way”: he finds it too rational. It
does not take us into the heart of the issue and lead us to deeper
exploration. His way is to listen to the word we wish to plunge into or
experience, here philosophy, and straightaway we find that das
Wortsprichtgreichisch – the word speaks Greek. By this we do not
mean that “philosophy” (as much in German as in English) has a
Greek root, but that the word itself speaks Greek: it addressed us in
Greek. Another key issue in Heidegger is that it is language, not man
that speaks. And what does it say to us?

“The word Philosophia(Heidegger, understandably writes it in Greek

letters) tells us that philosophy is something that determines the
existence of the Greek world. Not only that – Philosophiadetermines
the Grundugof our Western-European history.” Grundzug, with its
evident link with Grund(Ground) has the connotation of earthiness,
a hoary rootedness which goes back to primeval beginnings, and can
only be translated into English, approximately, as ‘innermost, most
basic feature’ or something like that. Philosophy, then, has shaped
Western-European culture.

Let us follow, then, this path, the path suggested by etymologies. This
path ‘summons us back’, ‘reclaims us’, ‘revokes us’ a pilgrimage to
the well-springs of Greek thought. And we begin to recognize that the
Greek language “is no mere language like the European languages
known to us. The Greek language and it alone is logos… in the Greek
language what is said is at the same time, and in an eminent way,
that which it is called (is designated as). If we hear a Greek word with
a Greek ear, we follow its legein(speaking), its direct immediate
presentation of what it says.” And he adds the sentence with which
has concluded the last section, “through the audible Greek word we
are directly in the presence to the thing itself, not first in the
presence of a mere word-sign.” This is what Steiner calls Heidegger’s
“etymological realism”, Heidegger’s conviction that Greek words (at
last once upon a time), since they stood at the origin of western
philosophizing and of many western languages (this applies, really,
 44

more to German than other west-European speeches), were ale to

give us direct access to reality!

On Being and beings

As we listen faithfully to the legeinof philosophia, we discover the
basic Heideggerain distinction which has ever remained the core and
centre of his meditation: the distinction between Being and being.
The philodophia, we are told, no doubt goes back to Heraclitus and
so it is in him that we must seek to understand the meaning of its two
root-words Philein (to love) and sophon(roughly, wisdom). Now
Philein, in Heraclitus, Heidegger tells us, has the same connotations
as homologein(literally, to speak the same thing), it implies so
sprechenwie der Logos spricht(to speak as the logos speaks), d.h.
dem logos entsprechen. The second part of that sentence is difficult
to put into English. The d. h. (das heist) is the equivalent of our
English i.e. (that is). It is not easy to render entsprechen:dem logos
entsprechenimplies, echoing what its says, harmonizing with it. Thus
harmoniais a characteristic of Heaclitean loving. And what is it that
the logos says through sophon? What is this “message” that we must
“harmonize with”? This, indeed, is the basic “message of Heraclitus:
Pantatoonta! Heidegger paraphrases it thus: AllesSeiendeistim Sein:
das Soinist das Seinde, All being (noun form, i.e. All existence or
existing things) is Being (verbal form, i.e. Possess, express or
manifest the activity of existence, of Being, more pointedly being is
Being. In other words, every existent thing, whether it be man, a
stone or God is a manifestation of existence. None of these can be
identified with existence itself, yet, if we want to study existence, we
have to settle for these. After all, we never come upon pure existence
as such (Be-ing). We only come across things which Be (exist). Our
only chance to study Being is to focus on the Being of beings, but we
must never think that these being are Being itself. We can only study
Being (the real goal of metaphysics) by studying its manifestation in
beings.

Let us quote Heidegger’s elucidation of this Lichtung in his thought:

All being is Being. To hear such a thing sounds trivial to our ear, if
not, offensive, for no one needs to bother about the fact that being
belongs to Being. All that world knows that being is that which is.
What else remains fro being but to Be? And yet, just this fact that
 45

being is gathered together into Being, that in the appearance of Being

appears, astonished the Greeks first and astonished them and them
alone.
Thus I have called Heidegger’s philosophy of Being, his philosophy of
the World.
His philosophy of man

Dasein, Der Mann, Das Man

Since Being (verbal form, ie. ‘the to-be’) does not manifest itself
directly, we must settle for questioning it, looking for a path into it,
through one or other manifestation of it- ie by means of some
manifest being. This is best provided by man himself (der Mann, in
German) who is the only being that reveals itself as concerned with
‘the to-be’ (Being). Because of his consciousness, man is able to raise
the question of Being, indeed, he is the only manifest being who does
and can do so! He is thus our best link between beings (seiendes) and
Being, ‘the to-be’ (in German Sein, which is the verb form, whereas
bsejendes is the plural of the noun form).

Heidegger suggests a characteristic name for man, a name that

reminds us that he is, as it were, the locus of the interplay between
being and Being, which affords us to path to Being: man is Dasein
(literally, there-to-be). This coined word is meant to indicate the fact
that man is the only being which questions Being (‘the to-be’, verbal
form) and thereby expresses the presence or “thereness” (Da) of
Being in differentiation from bring. The same idea is implied in
Heidegger’s calling man Existenz, going by the original etymological
meaning to the word: man ex-sists. That is, he ‘stands out’ or, more
accurately ‘puts himself out of himself’. This, as we have said, is due
to his consciousness.

Man is not alone: he is a being within the world and within a

grouping of other men, other persons. This is not an unmixed
blessing for the can use this social interdependence to sacrifice the
agony and quest of building up his own personal conviction and
beliefs and take refuge in becoming part of the anonymous mass. He
has such-and-such beliefs and values, not as the result of a personal
struggle or conviction, but because in a given society, that is what
“one” is supposed to believe. He says this, he does that, he upholds
 46

such a value because that is what “one” in this country or social class
or whatever is expected to do. Instead of living as a man (der mann)
he has settled for being an impersonal, anonymous “One” is
supposed to believe.

He says this, he does that, he upholds such a value because that is

what “one” in this country or social calls or whatever is expected to
do. Instead of living as a man (de mann) he has settled for being an
impersonal, anonymous “one” (das Man:) notice the word-play in
German – Mann, spelt with two ‘ns’ means the human person, spelt
with a single ‘n’ and of the neuter gender, it corresponds to the
impersonal French on or the English ‘one’ or ‘they’ in statements like,
‘in India one never acts like that! Or ‘they say that Jews are money-
mad.’ We have, then, two choices. Either I live up to my
responsibility as Mann and this is authentic Existenz, or I surrender
to the anonymity of being just Man, which is inauthentic Existenz.
It’s a matter of deciding what is greater for me: personal conviction
and responsibility as Mann or (false) security and assurance as Man.

Man as “care-taker” or “shephered” beyond Lord

Man, as we have noted, is not only Existenz, he is also being in the –
world. However, this latter statement is too general and needs to be
clarified. After all, stones and trees are also beings and are in-the-
world. No does Heidegger mean that man just happens to find
himself in the midst of a world of things and men. He is a being of
such a nature that he is positively and necessarily oriented towards,
preoccupied with, concerned with, the other. This concern for “the
other “is constitutive of his very mode of being. Now, the word for
‘care’, in German is Sorge and it has all the connotations of nursing,
tending, nurturing. That is why Heidegger gives man the title of
“care-taker” of Being, “the –other”.

This is his characteristic note. The word “shepherd” is one which

admirably sumps up all the connotations of Sorge that we have listed
above. Hence the Heideggerian usage of that term, too. All this is, of
course, rooted in the fact that an is, as we have seen, the only being
who can and does raise the question of the Being of beings. He is
 47

thus open to Being. Man is thus one who stands in a special relation
to Being and also one who has some kind of preliminary ideas of
Being. To ask a question, as Heidegger so perceptively remarks,
implies already some vague knowledge of what that thing is. It is the
vagueness of this knowledge that moves us to seek a deeper
understanding or Being. On the other hand, we can only attain this
deeper understanding because we already have some kind of grasp of
it at the start, however hazy. This is Heidegger’s famous
“hermeneutical circle”.

Man as “geworfenheit” (“thrown-ness”)

We can also speak of man as Dasein from a slightly different
perspective. We could say that he finds himself “thrown” inextricably
into the world. He does not know clearly whence he has come. But he
finds himself there and he cannot be otherwise. Dasein (being-in-
the-world) man is also Mitsein (being-with). Man’ throwness implies
also the awareness of finitude and of certain abandonment even. He
is left to world out his various possibilities, interpret the world and
elaborate his own projects. Of course, there is a kind of
interdependence. But his is as much a hindrance as a help. For it can
function as an urge to take refuge in the “one” (das Man), sacrificing
the struggle and task to find “my” meaning, “my” projects, “my”
value to the pseudo-security of merging all these into the anonymity
of the mass, settling to have the meaning, values and projects which
“One” is expected to have as a member of this nation or class or
group.

Man and Death

Man, as ezistenz, as being-in-front-of-itself, or self-projection,
reaches out to the fulfillment of his possibilities. But there is one,
final and grim “possibility” that is assured to all men. It is the
“possibility” that annihilates all other possibilities and heightens his
sense of finitude and abandonment –death. Man is, thus, a being
“thrown” into the world and destined for death. This obscure
consciousness of his final condition arouses in him the very
existential experience of “dread”. Once again man has two
possibilities. He can seek to run away from this dread by immersing
himself in the daily round of activities that make put the life cycle of
“one”. Or he can choose to live authentically, su specie motis, under
 48

the aspect of death, personally committing himself to realize his

potentialities as best as he can, accepting his finitude, his
abandonment and his final annihilation. In practice, this will involve
some king of acceptance of “the one”, for every man cannot but
retain membership of the human community. Authentic existence is
possible, but only within certain limits.

Man and Time

Heidegger’s analysis of the human condition reveals that Sorge
(care), man’s constituent note, expresses itself in three temporal
moments. First, there is man as Existenz, which is concerned with
what he is to be, his self-projection. This is Dasien’s link with
futurity. Then there is his geworfenheit, the fact that he finds himself
already “thrown” into the world. Here is his rootedness in the past.
Finally, there is the phenomenon of Mitsein, the experience of being
–with the various things in this world which for him are but tools or
instruments for him to use (zeuge): their characteristic note is that
they are being-for. That is they are for man – earth is for the farmer,
the sea is for the sailor and so on. Besides the word of tools, man is
also involved with various projects and preoccupations. These three
moments of Sorge are, as we have noted, essentially temporal. Now,
if the only access to Being possible for man is through an analysis of
the being of an and if the being of man reveals itself as essentially
temporal – might it not be that time itself is the horizon against
which we are to interpret Being? With this question Heidegger closes
volume I of sein and ziet. He never got down to writing volume II.

HIS PHILOSOPHY OF GOD

An atheist?
One is naturally let to conclude, from the closing statements of
volume I of sein and Zeit, that Heidegger is an atheist. For he seems
to imply that Being is necessarily finite and temporal. Anything that
would be infinite and eternal would be, by that very account, Nichts
(Nothing). However, let us not forget that the conclusion of that tome
are expressed more in the form of a question for further exploration
than a definitive statement. At any rate, Heidegger himself has
protested strongly against an atheistic interpretation of his
philosophy, above all in his celebrated Letter on Humanism. The
title refers to Sartre’s’ Existentialism is a Humanism and was
 49

published in 1947, a year after Sartre’s work. Originally a response to

some questions raised by his friend Jean Beaufret, the published
version was re-worked and expanded by Heidegger. In it we are told
that the existential analysis of man, such as was provided by sein and
Zeit, Volume I, neither affirms nor denies God. “Thus it is not only
rash but also an error in procedure to maintain in that the
interpretation of the essence of man from the relation of his essence
to the truth of Being is atheism”. He reminds us that he dad said the
same thing earlier in VomWesen des Grundes(English translation,
The Essence of Reasons).

An indifferentist, then?
If Heidegger is not positively an atheist, is he, at least, an
indifferentist? That is, one who couldn’t be bothered whether God
existed or not. The answer is, once again, no. it is just that the
question of the existence of God cannot, according to Heidegger, be
raised on the plane of the existential analysis of Dasein. The God
issue if related to the level of “the essence of the holy”. Modern man,
however, is so preoccupied with the world and his projects that he is
not normally open to this level. But his is not tantamount to
affirming that God is dead for modern man, in the Nietzschean
sense. Heidegger tells us that his philosophy is awaiting a new
manifestation of the divine and, in fact, this is the problem of the
world. Still, poets like Holderlin (Heidegger’s favorite) bear witness,
in some obscure and prophetic way, to the divine.

V FREDERICH NIETZSCHE
Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche, (born October 15, 1844, Röcken,

Saxony, Prussia [Germany]—died August 25, 1900, Weimar,
Thuringian States), German classical scholar, philosopher,
and critic of culture, who became one of the most-influential
of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives
that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and
philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians,
philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and
 50

playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the

triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his
observation that “God is dead,” in a way that determined the
agenda for many of Europe’s most-
celebrated intellectuals after his death. Although he was
an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power
politics, his name was later invoked by fascists to advance
the very things he loathed.

His Philosophy of the Human Person

The will to Power
Several contemporary thinkers have tried to define the
human person in terms of our most drive, that inner
motivation which, lying behind all others, is the ultimate
source of all that or strive after. For Freud, it is the desire for
sex. Frankly opted for our quest for meaning, hal spoke of
that intellectual dynamism which sends us forth to the
world without. For che it is simply “the Will to Power”. In
his book of the same name, he paraphrases the of his
erstwhile mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer, “This world is the
Will to Power and g else! And you yourselves are this Will
to Power and nothing else!” (Emphasis original) and Good
and Evil he sought to give some evidence for this otherwise
rather dogmatic an: “A living thing seeks above all to
discharge its force - life itself is Will to Power: self- nation
is only one of the indirect and most common
consequences thereof’.

Two Moralities
It was, again, in Beyond Good and Evil that Nietzsche
expounded his discovery of the tv c types of morality that
divide the human species: “slave morality” and “master
morality”. It effect, “slaves” are those who - for religious or
 51

other reasons - suppress the Will to Power at; 'settle for a

shallow, mediocre form of existence. The “masters”, on the
other hand, are those wh dare all and strive to realize the
full potentials of the Will to Power. According to “slave
morality, goodness and virtue are synonymous with
attitudes that justify ones wallowing in mediocrity - qualities
like humility, resignation and long-suffering. Badness and
vice would those “sins” which would tend to stir one out of
his complacency and urge him to better his lc:: things like
pride, ambition and the desire for glory. In “master’
morality, the good woul; comprise all that inspires one to
venture forth and realize ones full human drives – heroic
courage, boldness. Obviously, “evil” on such a scale of values
would be what is “good” for the slave. The herd-mentality of
the “slaves” is, further, so perverse that they try to drag the
“masters” down with them into the gutter by trying to inflict
guilt feelings on them by trying convince them of the
wickedness of what they, the “masters’ would hail as good!
“The revolt c: the slaves in moral begins with resentment
becoming creative and giving birth to values.”

The Superman
The word that Nietzsche coined in this connection,
Uebermensch, literally means Overman and that is how it is
sometimes translated, but it is the more amendable
Superman that seems to have won out. The Superman
stands for the one who surrenders himself fully to the Will
to Power and attains its fullest expression. As such, it is
more a goal to be achieved than an actual person. What
would such a person be like? Nietzsche interestingly
characterizes him as “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul”,
a fusion of all that is macho and beautiful with all that i>
constitutive of inner depth and maturity. “Man is a rope
 52

stretched between the animal and the Superman”, wrote

Nietzsche in his monumental Thus Spake Zarathustra. He
is “a rope over an abyss”. The more one assents to the Will
to Power, tire more will he move towards the Superman -
else he succumbs to the grade of the animal.

Dionysius and Apollo

Nietzsche raised these twin concepts in his first - and only
well-constructed! - Book, The Birth of Tragedy the Spirit of
Music and in them we can already glimpse of hint of the
notions of the Will to Power and Superman which he would
elaborate later. Together with the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche
was convinced that life was basically something fearsome,
horrible an; terrible. The only way to deal with it in a
meaningful manner was through art. Human culture for
him, was but man’s way of coming to terms with the
terrifying thing that life was. One way to do this is by flight,
whereby one escapes from the formidableness of life into an
ideal an; imaginary “life” through painting and sculpture.
The other, more manly, way is to meet it hea; on with
courage and fortitude by the medium of tragedy ... and
music. At one time, Nietzsche was all praise for Wagner for
he saw his music as moving in this vein. Later, he fell out
with him former model when, the latter began to compose
operas like Parsifal which fell back, no longer on lusty pagan
warrior themes but on Christian stories and legends. Apollo
was the Greek god of ideal beauty, a beauty attained through
discipline, restraint and reason - hence, for Nietzsche, the
patron and symbol of escapist art. Dionysius, the god of
wine, reigned supreme in the wanton orgies of Bacchic
revelry and was the obvious presiding muse for tragic ait
and manly music Though Nietzsche seemed to recognize
that authentic art should be some kind of blend of the two-
 53

creative impulse in some kind of form or pattern - his

sympathies were clearly more in line with Dionysius. After
all, it is the latter who would more truly say “Yes” to the Will
to Power, tc life.

Nietzsche on Woman
The Superman is necessarily masculine. Nietzsche, clearly a
misogynist, had no place for ; Superwoman. For him, the
chief - indeed, the only - merit of woman was that she be the
mother of a future manly warrior, a potential Superman.
“Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation
of the warrior”, he pontificates in Zarathustra, “All else is
folly”. And he concludes the section on Woman in that book
with the telling advice: “Thou goest to women" Remember
thy whip!” in a later section on Friendship he assures us,
“Woman is not yet capable of friendship, she knoweth only
love” (and by that last word he means crude sex). And he
sums it all up bluntly, “Women are yet ever cats and birds.
Or, at best, cows”.

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of God

Prophet of the Gospel of Atheism
... “Our heart is full of terrible pity”, Nietzsche wrote
sarcastically, “It is the old Jehovah himself preparing for
death... Can you hear the ringing of the bell? Kneel down,
they are bringing the sacraments to a dying God!” In these
and similar lurid words, Nietzsche stridently proclaimed
himself the Prophet of the Good News of Atheism. As he put
it in The Dawn of the Day, “The greatest event of recent
times - that ‘God is dead’, that is, belief in the Christian God
is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows
over Europe”. Why is atheism Good News, Gospel? Simply
because now the Superman can burst forth into full
 54

uninhibited flowering for “With God war is declared on life,

Nature and the will to live”. (Twilight of the Idols) As he
would put it n Ecce Homo, Christianity is “a continuous
suicide of reason... The Christian faith from the beginning is
sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-
confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-
derision and self-mutilation”. On the other hand, the Gospel
of Atheism, as announced in Zarathustra calls for just the
opposite: “I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the
earth and believe not those who speak to you of super-
terrestrial hopes... once blasphemy against God was the
greatest of blasphemies, but God died, so these blasphemies
died also. Now the most terrible of sins is to blaspheme
against the earth and to rate the depths of the Unknowable
One [i.e. God] higher than the meaning of the earth!”

Nietzsche on Christianity
We have already had occasion to recall some of Nietzsche’s
shrill diatribes against Christianity, calling it, among other
things, “the immortal curse of mankind”. Indeed, his
scurrillous attacks on the religion of his childhood are
rivalled only by his harsh words against Judaism, which,
according to him, laid the seeds of that other-worldliness
and negation of the earth that would be carried on in
Christianity. Understandably, priests are seen as the arch-
culprits, the propagators of a mascochistic, world-hating
and pro-slave spirituality. They are “insidious dwarfs”, “a
parasitical human type”, “anointed world traducers”,
“venomous spiders of life”, the “cleverest of conscious
hypocrites” and much else besides. And the most
outstanding examples of such men are the Jesuits!
However, as we shall see in the critical comments, to be fair
to Nietzshce, we must quote other passages where he seems
 55

to relent and even contradict these ideas. He was assuredly a

complex character, this self-vaunted anti-Christ!

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the World

His exaltation of the Pre-Socratics
For Nietzsche, the Golden Age of Greek philosophy was not
the conventional Socrates-Plato- Aristotle triad, but those
who came before them. According to him, the pre-Socratics,
in focussing their attention on the World and on the
celebration of cosmic harmonies, were the really supreme
thinkers who, as ontologists and metaphysicians par
excellence, were summoning mankind, right from the
outset of philosophy, to be true to the earth. With Socrates
and the exaltation of reason, form and restraint, the whole
movement of human culture and development took a
retrograde step: back we went to moral laws and strait-
jackets, to timidity and cowardice, a holding back before the
great horizons of daring and adventure that had opened up
before us. Thus mankind, according to Nietzsche, made a
great leap... backwards!

Eternal Recurrence
This doctrine, allegedly glimpsed by Nietzsche in his early
writings and only later spelt out in all clarity and boldness,
came to be presented by him as the touchstone of a genuine
“yes- attitude” to life: only the one who could joyfully accept
this doctrine was saying a yes to the Will to Power. Of
course, the idea of a cyclic return of all persons and events
in the world was nothing new. Nietzsche had come across it
in the Indian and Greek authors he had studied. He sought
to give it some evidential basis in the manifestation of
nature as a closed circle, repeating itself again and again ...
and in the notion of reincarnation. In his late writing, The
 56

Will to Power, he even tried to harness the scientific

thinking of his age in its favour: “The principle :::
conservation of energy demands the eternal recurrence”,
he opined. And he went on to articuicie how the acceptance
of eternal recurrences is “the highest formula of the yea-
saying attitude : life, which can ever be attained”. It was, he
says, Schopenhauer’s “half-Christian, half-German
narrowness and simplicity” which forged his break with his
former mentor, to denounce ne latter’s negative, pessimistic
and world-negating nihilism. Finally, Nietzsche is at pains
project and image of himself as one who would bravely
welcome life’s eternal return, repies with all the
humiliations, sufferings and betrayals he, Nietzsche, had
known: “Oh, how shoulc I not be ardent for eternity and for
the marriage-ring of rings - the ring of eternal return”.

VI. JEAN PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)

Sartrean Ontology
Writers are drawing attention, these days, to the new ontology
implicit in all existential works. Though we may not go so far as to
hold with some that existentialism is but a neo-metaphysics, one
cannot deny that, for Sartre, his philosophy of reality is the key to
making sense of his philosophy, including, above all, his views on the
absurdity of things. Key words, here, are being-in-itself, being-for-
itself and nothingness. Sartrean ontology sees reality as basically
comprising subjects and objects. The former are being-for-itself
(pour soi), the latter make up the being-in-itself (ensoi). The ensoi is
primarily the fixed, static world of material objects around us. But it
can also include conscious individual beings – myself or others-
insofar as they are views as an object of introspection or objective
study. The pour soi is that which has awareness– it is not necessary
that this subject be always actually thinking or deliberating.
 57

More and more writers, now days, are drawing attention to the new
ontology implicit in existential works. We may not go so far as to
characterize the movement, as some critics do, “a kind of neo-
metaphysics and nothing more.” still, especially for Sartre, a grasp of
a particular existentialist ontology is pre-requisite for understanding
his philosophical outlook. Indeed, Sartre’s “anti-theology” and his
vision of man as a “useless passion”, together with his thesis of the
absurd are all founded on hi ontology. After all, the sub-title of Being
and Nothingness is “a phenomenological essay on ontology”. Key
notions, here, are being-in-itself (ensoi), being –for-itself (pour soi)
and nothingness (neant). Let us take a brief clarificatory look at each.

Being-in-itself (ensoi)
This is the first of the two major categories within which all reality
falls. Being-in –itself can roughly be identified with objects.
However, let us rememb4er that under this heading comes not only
the material things of our daily existence (trees, tables, buildings and
so on), but every conscious beings – myself and other persons,
whenever we contemplate them objectively, either thought detached
introspection or cold observation. The notion of being-in-itself
implies fixity. Mere static being there, no scope for spontaneity,
freedom of development. It is a finished product, inert and passive.
When I treat a conscious being as an object, as explained above, I
reduce it to a defined and rigid thing.

Being-for-itself (pour soi)

This is the world of subjects, conscious beings. Such beings, in the
strict sense, are not. They can best be called becoming: they have no
pre-ordained or fixed nature. They are spontaneous and free. They
must “make themselves” through their actions, for they have no in-
written nature or pre-ordained laws to limit or guide their
development. The subject would better be defined in terms of
awareness, rather then consciousness, actually. As Norman Greene
sums it up, in his book TheExistentialist Ethic (Ann Arobor,
University of Michigan Press, 1960, 21). “That which exist is not (for
Sartre) subjectivity as such, but various individual instances of
subjectivity. In each instance of subjectivity, we find not a new kind
of being, but a process by being becomes aware of itself.”
 58

Nothingness
In his imaginary exchange between Heidegger and Sartre, Joseph
Fell has Sartre remarked to Heidegger that they have “nothing” in
common. And this is literally true. The notion of “nothing” (le neant
for Sartre and das Nichts for Heidegger) is made good use of by both
philosophers. In fact, Sartre is indebted to Heidegger for it though, it
must be admitted, in the formers’ hands it has no longer the same
significance. The fact is further complicated by the fact that,
according to me, le neant has two distinct (though not wholly
unrelated) connotations. First, it can be seen as a kind of synonym
for the pour-soi, as being properly identifies the finished product
that is the en-soi. Then – and this is its primary significance in
Sartre – it is a necessary by-product of the work of consciousness (le
pour-soi). For, it its function of observing things, (l’ensoi) it detaches
some objects from others and gives meaning or form to them. In
effect, it is at the same time, by its ignoring or disregarding the rest
of things, it temporarily annihilates them, inasmuch as it leaves them
formless and meaningless. This process, Sartre calls
neant(annihilation).

“Existence precedes Essence”

In his existentialism and humanism, Sartre puts forward as the
common and characteristic thesis of all existentialists the conviction
that “existence precedes essence, or if you prefer, that subjectivity
must be the starting-point.” What Sartre means by this is that the
existentialist does onto find a world of intelligible essences which
give meaning to things and which can be discovered by abstraction.
The basic datum is the given, concretely existing thing which is
gratuitous and incomprehensible. In other words, the existence of
the thing comes first, preceding its definition or essence. Nothing has
an essence a priori. Existents and their activities determine their
definition.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

Contingence
The starting - point for an understanding of Sartre’s vision is the
fundamental notion of la contingence. This is best done by looking
into Roquentin’s discovery of the fact through contemplation the root
 59

of an oak tree as he sat on a bench. “The world of explanations and

reason is not that of existence. A circle is not absurd: it accounts for
itself very well by the rotation of a line around one of its extremities.
But a circle does not exist for all that. The root, on the other hand,
existed in a manner which I was not able to account for… its function
accounts for nothing: it enabled be to grasp in general what a root
was, but it does not explain this root…. That remained beyond all
explanation.” Nothing explains why this particular is there!

Surplus
This is how I render the associated word de trop. No sooner does
Sartre realize that the material world is inexplicable – that is,
meaningless- in its particularity, does he recognize, to his horror,
that his existence is equally unaccountable for. He, as much as the
root, is merely “there”; there is no reason why the particular person
he is, or the particular thing anything is, should be there. All are
equally unnecessary, unjustifiable, surplus, de trop “I exited just like
a stone, a plant, a microbe.” Neither I, nor any of these things, have
any right to exist.

Nausea
The profusion of unnecessary and incomprehensible things is enough
to fill sensitive Roguentin with horror … Nausea. They intrude upon
him, as it were, and Sartre never tires to use the crudest images to
represent the “existential panic” their ineluctable abundance can
produce: “Soft monstrous masses, in disorder-naked, with a frightful
and obscene nudity.” In speaking of his own-and man’s –fact of
being de trop, he prefers metaphors borrowed from the most basic
bodily function, as this passage from the words, “breathing,
digesting, defecating with gay abandon, I was living just because I
had started living.” All this fills him with loathing and plunges him
into “a horrible ecstasy.” “Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this
town, and myself- that is nausea.”

Absurdity
The startling revelation that everything which exists has no reason
for existing sparks of, in Roquentin - Sartre, the terrible admission
that the whole world is founded on a frightening but unyielding
absurdity. “The word absurdity springs at the moment from my pen,”
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confesses the young mean. “I understood that I had found there the
ley of existence, the key to my nausea and of my whole life: the fact
that whatever I could seize upon thereafter leads to this fundamental
absurdity.” And this absurdity traps all things. Even reasonable
beings. “they hadn’t asked to exist, only they couldn’t have prevented
it; that is all.”

PHILOSOPHY OF MAN
The lonely Exile
This is the primary condition of man is a world which is absurd, man,
who has no established system of meanings and motives with which
to explain things. Images of loneliness, of being an exile and of
feeling-apart recur in Sartre’s writings. “We are anxiety itself,” he
writes bluntly in being and nothingness. And Orestes, in the flies
feels his loneliness as a kind of leprosy: “… alone, like a leper. I felt
alone, in the middle of my benign little world, like someone who has
lost his shadow.” “Or, as Mathieu in the reprieve, puts it more
eloquently, “I am nothing, I have nothing. As inseparable from the
world as the light and yet exiled, like light, slipping over the surface
of stones and of water, without anything ever clinging to me or
embracing me. Cast out. Cast out. Cast out of the world. Cast out
from the past. Cast out from my own self.”

Freedom
But suddenly there appears an apparent ray of hope on the gloomy
landscape. True, reality is contingent and absurd. Doubtless neither
man nor things have any essence, which might justify their existence.
All at once man realizes one thing: he, at least, can change. His
power of consciousness invests him with the ability to choose and
create his own essence, a porteriori while conscienceless; inanimate
matter is doomed forever to remain, fixed in its absurd state. Things
are imprisoned in non - meaning: man can create his own meaning.
We can grasp the sense of elation with which Orestes makes this
discovery: “I am free, Electra! Freedom has broken upon me like a
thunderbolt!” it is up to us to make our own standards of Good and
Evil. Nothing of man, the gods can do nothing against such a man!”
thus exclaims Orestes once again. “Justice is man’s affair,” he avers,
“I need no God to teach it to me.”
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“Condemned to be Free”
“I am my liberty,” writes Sartre in being and nothings. It is more
correct to say that man is freedom than to say that he has freedom.
“Freedom coincides at its roots with the non-being which is at the
heart of man.” (ibid.) however this freedom is not an unmixed
blessing; in fact, it is more of an unalloyed course. “I am condemned
to be free,” we read in an oft-quoted passage from the reprieve. For
freedom lays a heavy obligation on sour shoulders and there is no
release from this terrifying burden. At every moment we are obliged
to invent values, to independently on impulse, as it were- give
meaning to a senseless world. And it is not legitimate to abdicate this
fearsome duty by blindly following the alleged universal or objective
values offered us by society or religion or philosophy or whatever. To
quote Orestes once more, “I am condemned to have no other law but
my own...” we have not chosen to exist; we have not chosen to be
free. But we do exist and we are free. There is nothing we can do
about that. Now this burden of making choices in freedom every
moment, every day is all the more terrifying when we realize that in
each particular choice we make, we are implicating, somehow or the
other, the whole of mankind. For each choice that I make, willy-nilly,
creates a possible standard which others in a similar situation are
tacitly invited to follow

The refusal of Freedom

So terrifying is the responsibility of freedom, so relentless and so
exhausting are its demands that men seek to abdicate, to avoid it or,
worst of all, to pretend that they are not free. All this Sartre terms as
la mauvaisefoi(literally, bad faith, insincerity). Running away from
the anxiety (angoisse) that freedom brings, people mask their
feeling, but “we can only escape this upsetting thought by a kind of
bad faith.” (Existentialism and humanism) bad faith is culpable. It is
the worst crime in Sartre's book. For man, having realized and
accepted his freedom, must use it. To hid it or surrender it in any way
is to prove oneself either a coward (lache) or a bastard (salaud).
“Those who will hide, either with full intent or by pleas of
determinism, their total liberty, I call coward. Those who try to show
that their existence was necessary, though contingence envelops the
appearance of man on the earth. I call bustards.” (ibid.)
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Human relationships Doomed

It should already be evident why; in the Sartrean perspective, all
human relationships are veiled forms of either sadism or masochism.
This is because any inter-personal exchange involves the cash of two
freedoms. In the fact of this, one or the other must submit before the
other to allow for peace and stability. If I submit before the other and
claim to have found joy in this, then I am a masochist: I am finding
pleasure in destroying myself. On the other hand, if I am able to find
fulfillment in another’s submission to me, then I am a sadist: I am
finding pleasure in destroying another. Thus, in all Sartre’s novel and
plays, e never comes across two people achieving a harmonious
relationship, each retaining his identity (freedom). This is not merely
because of personal problems or defects on the part of the persons
concerned. It is impossible in principle. Such attempts are all
doomed to failure because it is not possible for two consciousnesses
to confront each other without one of them ceasing to be
consciousness; each will try to transcend the other and neither can
transcend the other while still remaining consciousness.

A “useless passion”
The pour-soi longs for the stability and rest of the en-soi. It would
wish to achieve such repose while at the same time retaining its
freedom. In short, it is demanding the impossible – to be, at the
same time, en-soi-pour-soi, which is a contradiction, it is in this
sense that he says that man is a “useless passion”, a longing for what
can never be. And only despair can result from such an unfulfillable
desire. The only “solution” is to accept the despair that cannot but
result from this “useless passion”. Then only can authentic,
constructive, life begin. In Orestes’ words, “human life begins on the
other side of despair.” However, most man find this despairs too
painful and so they take the easiest way out. If they can’t have
stability and freedom, they prefer to sacrifice their freedom for the
sake of stability alone. In other words, they opt to be en-soi, trying to
cover up their mauvaisefoi by various pretences.

PHILOSOPHY OF GOD
The desire to be God
We have seen above that man is basically a useless passion, that is,
he is ever striving to fulfill an impossible dream, a basic
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contradiction: to be en-soi-pour-soi. We can say this same thing in a

slightly different way: in effect, “the best way to conceive of the
fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being
whose project is to be God.” (being and nothingness) after all, God is
the being who, by definition, creates essences (pour-soi) and, at the
same time, would be the stable possessor of all these essence (en-
soi). Thus man’s “useless passion” is “the desire to be God.” And God
– at least in the Sartrean ontology – does not exist, cannot exist,
because such a being involves a blatant contradiction.

Atheism or anti-atheism
Sartre is an atheist, but – at his admission – not one who would
waste time discussing the merits or demerits of the possible existence
of God. He dismisses the deity as but one of the various forms of
mauvasiefoi which people use for abdicating their freedom and not
doing anything. As he points out in clarificatory paragraph from
existentialism and humanism: “existentialism isn’t the type of
atheism as would exhaust itself in demonstrating that God didn’t
exist. It avers rather: even if God existed, that would make no
difference- such is our point of view… man must re-discover himself
and convince himself that he must save himself, even if it were
possible to come up with a valid proof of God’s existence.” Such, at
any rate, is Sartre’s avowal. Just how incidental or irrelevant is the
issue of God’s existence, we shall explore in our critical comments.

VII. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986)

There are some thinkers who are, from the very beginning,
unambiguously identified as philosophers (e.g., Plato). There are
others whose philosophical place is forever contested (e.g.,
Nietzsche); and there are those who have gradually won the right to
be admitted into the philosophical fold. Simone de Beauvoir is one of
these belatedly acknowledged philosophers. Identifying herself as an
author rather than as a philosopher and calling herself the midwife of
Sartre’s existential ethics rather than a thinker in her own right,
Beauvoir’s place in philosophy had to be won against her word. That
place is now uncontested. The international conference celebrating
the centennial of Beauvoir’s birth organized by Julia Kristeva is one
of the more visible signs of Beauvoir’s growing influence and status.
 64

Her enduring contributions to the fields of ethics, politics,

existentialism, phenomenology and feminist theory and her
significance as an activist and public intellectual is now a matter of
record. Unlike her status as a philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir’s
position as a feminist theorist has never been in question.
Controversial from the beginning, The Second Sex’s critique of
patriarchy continues to challenge social, political and religious
categories used to justify women’s inferior status. Though readers of
the English translation of The Second Sex have never had trouble
understanding the feminist significance of its analysis of patriarchy, 
they might be forgiven for missing its philosophical importance so
long as they had to rely on an arbitrarily abridged version of The
Second Sex that was questionably translated by a zoologist who was
deaf to the philosophical meanings and nuances of Beauvoir’s French
terms. The 2010 translation of The Second Sex changed that. In
addition to providing the full text, this translation’s sensitivity to the
philosophical valence of Beauvoir’s writing makes it possible for her
English readers to understand the existential-phenomenological
grounds of her feminist analysis of the forces that subordinate
women to men and designate her as the Other.

She was the life-long disciple and companion of Jean-Paul Sartre

(after whom she was placed second in her philosophical studies at
the Sorbonne), was born in Paris, taught in various Lycees, emerged
after world war II as one of the leaders of the nascent existentialist
movement, travelled widely in Europe and America. She is also one
of the first in-depth exponents of feminism. Her two-volume study of
women, The Second Sex came out in 1949 and the publication of her
novel, the Mandarins (1954), which explored the same theme, won
her the converted French literary award the Prix Goncourt.

Much of her writings are autobiographical and abound with

reference to her friends and the famous people of her time, many of
whom she knew intimately. Memories of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
tell of her youth and early studies. The Prime of Life (1960)
chronicles her experiences of the war, especially during the Nazi
occupation of France. The third volume of her autobiography, Force
of Circumstances (1963) describes post-war France until the 1954
revolution in the French colony of Algeria. Finally, in All Said and
 65

Done (1974), she discusses her life from 1962 to 1972. Other well-
known works of hers include the novel She Came to Stay(1943) and
her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).

A question that naturally comes to mind is why there are so few (any
at all?) women philosophers. It is assuredly not because women have
not the required intellectual ability to philosophize! Other callings
have attracted their attention, apparently, the more practical ones.
Whether this be of their choice or due to social pressures is, of
course, debatable. At any rate, three is barely any philosopher of note
in the thousands of years of recorded history, in the East as much as
in the west. Even Ms. Beauvoir, philosopher though she might be in
her own right, has no particularly unique theory or idea of her own in
philosophy, apart from her studies of feminism and her
documentation of male chauvinism!

FEMINISM
The Second Sex
Most philosophers agree that Beauvoir's greatest contribution to
philosophy is her revolutionary magnum opus, The Second Sex.
Published in two volumes in 1949 (condensed into one text divided
into two "books" in English), this work immediately found both an
eager audience and harsh critics. The Second Sex was so
controversial that the Vatican put it (along with her novel, The
Mandarins) on the Index of prohibited books. At the time The
Second Sex was written, very little serious philosophy on women
from a feminist perspective had been done. With the exception of a
handful of books, systematic treatments of the oppression of women
both historically and in the modern age were almost unheard of.
Striking for the breadth of research and the profundity of its central
insights, The Second Sex remains to this day one of the foundational
texts in philosophy, feminism, and women's studies.

The main thesis of The Second Sex revolves around the idea that
woman has been held in a relationship of long-standing oppression
to man through her relegation to being man's "Other." In agreement
with Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy, Beauvoir finds that the self
needs otherness in order to define itself as a subject; the category of
the otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the self as
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a self. However, the movement of self-understanding through alterity

is supposed to be reciprocal in that the self is often just as much
objectified by its other as the self objectifies it. What Beauvoir
discovers in her multifaceted investigation into woman's situation, is
that woman is consistently defined as the Other by man who takes on
the role of the Self.

As Beauvoir explains in her Introduction, woman "is the incidental,

the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is
the Absolute-she is the Other." In addition, Beauvoir maintains that
human existence is an ambiguous interplay between transcendence
and immanence, yet men have been privileged with expressing
transcendence through projects, whereas women have been forced
into the repetitive and uncreative life of immanence. Beauvoir thus
proposes to investigate how this radically unequal relationship
emerged as well as what structures, attitudes and presuppositions
continue to maintain its social power.

The work is divided into two major themes. The first book
investigates the "Facts and Myths" about women from multiple
perspectives including the biological-scientific, psychoanalytic,
materialistic, historical, literary and anthropological. In each of these
treatments, Beauvoir is careful to claim that none of them is
sufficient to explain woman's definition as man's Other or her
consequent oppression. However, each of them contributes to
woman's overall situation as the Other sex. For example, in her
discussion of biology and history, she notes the women experience
certain phenomena such as pregnancy, lactation, and menstruation
that are foreign to men's experience and thus contribute to a marked
difference in women's situation. However, these physiological
occurrences in no way directly cause woman to be man's subordinate
because biology and history are not mere "facts" of an unbiased
observer, but are always incorporated into and interpreted from a
situation. In addition, she acknowledges that psychoanalysis and
historical materialism contribute tremendous insights into the
sexual, familial and material life of woman, but fail to account for the
whole picture. In the case of psychoanalysis, it denies the reality of
choice and in the case of historical materialism, it neglects to take
 67

into account the existential importance of the phenomena it reduces

to material conditions.

The most philosophically rich discussion of Book I comes in

Beauvoir's analysis of myths. There she tackles the way in which the
preceding analyses (biological, historical, psychoanalytic, etc.)
contribute to the formulation of the myth of the "Eternal Feminine."
This paradigmatic myth, which incorporates multiple myths of
woman under it (such as the myth of the mother, the virgin, the
motherland, nature, etc.) attempts to trap woman into an impossible
ideal by denying the individuality and situation of all different kinds
of women. In fact, the ideal set by the Eternal Feminine sets up an
impossible expectation because the various manifestations of the
myth of femininity appear as contradictory and doubled. For
example, history shows us that for as many representations of the
mother as the respected guardian of life, there are as many
depictions of her as the hated harbinger of death. The contradiction
that man feels at having been born and having to die gets projected
onto the mother who takes the blame for both. Thus woman as
mother is both hated and loved and individual mothers are
hopelessly caught in the contradiction. This doubled and
contradictory operation appears in all feminine myths, thus forcing
women to unfairly take the burden and blame for existence.

Book II begins with Beauvoir's most famous assertion, "One is not

born, but rather becomes, a woman." By this, Beauvoir means to
destroy the essentialism which claims that women are born
"feminine" (according to whatever the culture and time define it to
be) but are rather constructed to be such through social
indoctrination. Using a wide array of accounts and observations, the
first section of Book II traces the education of woman from her
childhood, through her adolescence and finally to her experiences of
lesbianism and sexual initiation (if she has any). At each stage,
Beauvoir illustrates how women are forced to relinquish their claims
to transcendence and authentic subjectivity by a progressively more
stringent acceptance of the "passive" and "alienated" role to man's
"active" and "subjective" demands. Woman's passivity and alienation
are then explored in what Beauvoir entitles her "Situation" and her
"Justifications." Beauvoir studies the roles of wife, mother, and
 68

prostitute to show how women, instead of transcending through

work and creativity, are forced into monotonous existences of having
children, tending house and being the sexual receptacles of the male
libido.

Because she maintains the existentialist belief in the absolute

ontological freedom of each existent regardless of sex, Beauvoir
never claims that man has succeeded in destroying woman's freedom
or in actually turning her into an "object" in relation to his
subjectivity. She remains a transcendent freedom despite her
objectification, alienation and oppression.

Although we certainly can not claim that woman's role as the Other is
her fault, we also cannot say that she is always entirely innocent in
her subjection. As taken up in the discussion of The Ethics of
Ambiguity, Beauvoir believes that there are many possible attitudes
of bad faith where the existent flees his or her responsibility into
prefabricated values and beliefs. Many women living in a patriarchal
culture are guilty of the same action and thus are in some ways
complicitous in their own subjugation because of the seeming
benefits it can bring as well as the respite from responsibility it
promises. Beauvoir discusses three particular inauthentic attitudes in
which women hide their freedom in: "The Narcissist," "The Woman
in Love," and "The Mystic." In all three of these attitudes, women
deny the original thrust of their freedom by submerging it into the
object; in the case of the first, the object is herself, the second, her
beloved and the third, the absolute or God.

Beauvoir concludes her work by asserting various concrete demands

necessary for woman's emancipation and the reclamation of her
selfhood. First and foremost, she demands that woman be allowed to
transcend through her own free projects with all the danger, risk, and
uncertainty that entails. As such, modern woman "prides herself on
thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men;
instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their
equal." In order to ensure woman's equality, Beauvoir advocates such
changes in social structures such as universal childcare, equal
education, contraception, and legal abortion for women-and perhaps
most importantly, woman's economic freedom and independence
 69

from man. In order to achieve this kind of independence, Beauvoir

believes that women will benefit from non-alienating, non-
exploitative productive labor to some degree. In other words,
Beauvoir believes that women will benefit tremendously from work.
As far as marriage is concerned, the nuclear family is damaging to
both partners, especially the woman. Marriage, like any other
authentic choice, must be chosen actively and at all times or else it is
a flight from freedom into a static institution.

Beauvoir's emphasis on the fact that women need access to the same
kinds of activities and projects as men places her to some extent in
the tradition of liberal, or second-wave feminism. She demands that
women be treated as equal to men and laws, customs and education
must be altered to encourage this. However, The Second Sex always
maintains its fundamental existentialist belief that each individual,
regardless of sex, class or age, should be encouraged to define him or
herself and to take on the individual responsibility that comes with
freedom. This requires not just focusing on universal institutions, but
on the situated individual existent struggling within the ambiguity of
existence.

VIII. ALBERT CAMUS (1913-60)

Alert Camus born in 1913 in Algeria; his father died in a war, when
Albert was only one year old. He experienced extreme poverty in his
childhood. His love for nature is reflected in his writings. Besides
poverty, he experienced illness (tuberculosis) as well. During the II
World War he worked with the resistance group. In 1957 he received
Nobel Prize for literature. In 1960 he died in a car accident. Some of
his works are: The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, The Rebel, The
Plague etc.

A. His Philosophy
His north-African background must have had a role to play in his
neo-paganism and love for nature. There is in every Algerian an
earthly innocence by which he lives the present life to the full. Camus
is critical of the European approach and attitude that is more
 70

‘future’-oriented’. They turn their back to the concreteness of the

here and now, and turn to the delusion of power; they reject the
misery of the slums in preference to the mirage of an eternal city;
they forget the ordinary justice and remind themselves of the
Promised Land. Hence he refuses and repudiates the joys and
beauties of the world.

1. Absurdity
The theme of absurdity is as old as the book of Ecclesiastes; but
Camus has expressed it very accurately as the mood of his time. The
setting was ideal, and he epitomized the prevalent climate of France
under German occupation.

a. Contributing factors
There are many factors that have contributed towards absurdity
being experienced. The human seeks reasons and explanations, but
he is frustrated as no explanation is forthcoming. The contributing
factors are the following. Science: despite its dogmatic claims,
science ends in hypothesis, and thus inadequate. Instead of
understanding, what we find in the world of science is opacity and
irrationality. The powerlessness of the powerful science and reason!
Monotony of Life: life goes on in an orderly and systematic way:
daily, weekly, monthly and yearly time-table and schedule in an
uninterrupted way. We become conscious of the monotony of it,
when we are awakened in thought. Time: man becomes suddenly
aware that time is his worst enemy. We are being carried by time,
and suddenly it destroys us as it takes us to the no-further. This too
begets absurdity. World: the denseness, opacity and hostility of the
world, that have been remaining dormant, suddenly show themselves
violently, and we are thrown into absurdity as there is no why for it.
Inhumanity in the humans: humans have turned out to be inhuman
in their words and actions. The rational beings are engaged in
irrational violence. Death: the inevitability of death puts an end to all
his plans and ambitions. The futility of human life comes to the force.

b. The Nature of Absurdity

The word in itself is neither rational nor absurd: only in relation to
the human it manifests itself as absurd. It si born of the
confrontation between the human need for explanation and the
 71

unreasonable silence of the world to give reason. Thus the absurd is

neither in the human nor in the world, but in their confrontation.
Themyth of Sisyphus quite dramatically presents the absurd hero.
Based on this presentation, absurdity can be explained as the
‘awareness of oneself as condemned to tragic purposelessness’.
Sisyphus was the personification of it, as he had to roll the huge
stone up the hill, without any purpose, and then to allow it to roll
down, he was punished for disobeying the Gods by refusing to return
to the under-world. He was forcibly taken to the underworld where
the huge stone was awaiting him. His scorn of gods, hatred of death,
passion for life, brought about the punishment. There is happiness in
him in his refusal to give in, in his resentful stubbornness to remain
in this struggle.

c. Response to Absurdity
One of the commonest responses to absurdity is escaping from it
either by physical or philosophical suicide. Physical suicide is the
voluntary termination of life. Philosophical suicide is a taking refuge
in faith and religion in order to escape the absurd. According to
Camus, neither physical suicide nor philosophical suicide (hope) is
the authentic response to absurdity. Suicide is a cowardly act, by
which absurdity is apparently destroyed. It is a facile solution in the
face of absurdity. Such a response lacks a fundamental honesty, since
it represents a refusal to face the situation of absurdity. It a cowardly
compromise.

Revolt is a more authentic response to absurdity. After rejecting

physical and philosophical suicide as a way out, Camus opts to face
the absurd squarely by constant confrontation. The human has to
engage in an ongoing struggle, although he knows that he can never
win this struggle. It is a confrontation between man and his
obscurity. The sight of such a struggle is an example of human pride
in action. There is majesty in hope in terms of the two human dreams
of eternity and total understanding- religion and reason. The revolt
against the absurd results in a new freedom – an experience of
genuine freedom! There are no restraints on his actions. This
freedom is owing to is having no future and superior being, he is his
own master.
 72

The truly liberated human is completely indifferent to the future

and thus rejects any scale of values. That is, he rejects and ‘ethics of
quality’ and accepts an ethics of quantity’. What is important for the
absurd man is not the ‘best’ way of living but the ‘most’ living. He
strives to live more, and not better. Every action is of equal value.
Man can live with the irresponsibility of the condemned criminal,
who has nothing to lose!

2. Moderation and Recollection

After the World War II, Camus began to show signs of moderation
from his philosophical extremity. The myth of Sisyphus conclusions
were in agreement with Hitler’s atrocities. He became convinced of a
change, since the Nazi atrocities were the logical outcome of an
‘ethics of quantity’ that admits of no distinction between right and
wrong (ethics of quality). He opted from some sort of values in life
and limit in freedom. [Sartre was opposed to Camus changed view].

In his later works, Camus gradually expressed his changed

thought. In his the Plague (1947) Camus argues that we must extend
a helping hand to our fellow humans to combat the ‘plague’ of the
irrational and absurdity. But it falls short of the judo – Christian
attitude to suffering. To the common struggle against the oppressive
plague, people have discovered their solidarity; and with this they
have learned the meaning of ‘compassion’. Humans have an
obligation to keep the human solidarity alive by fighting against the
plague and for compassion. In spite of human solidarity and love for
each other, there is still a collective importance, i.e. Despite his fight
against t absurd, man’s ultimate end is defeat and death. Thus no
victory over the absurd is possible. Still Camus ops for an ‘ethics of
quality’.

In his Rebel (1951) Camus makes the penetrating analysis of

‘rebellion’. He takes the rejection of suicide as the foundational
principle in this work: man has decided to live since our personal
existence has some value. He distinguishes between metaphysical
and historical rebellion. Metaphysical rebellion denies absolute
freedom, and acknowledges existence with some limits. He chooses
to fight for justice rather than one’s own life. It is not interchange of
 73

roles, but an affirmation of the value of humanity, metaphysical

revolt is based on a belief in a common human dignity, Camus notes
as to how some historical fugues, under the guise of the defense for
human rights, became notorious oppressors of humanity. Many
dreamers of utopians have ended up in failure, as they lost sight of
the ‘limit’. In his last two works, (The Fall and Exile and Kingdom)
Camus enters the stage of repentance. Man is presented, not as the
‘innocent rebel’ but as the ‘guilty other’. He cannot live with his
conscience; hence he looks for a judge who will condemn him, and
then pardon him. But there is neither condemnation nor pardon in
sight: “who would dare condemn me in a world without judge, where
none is innocent.”

IX. FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924)

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-

language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as
one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which
fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated
protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and
incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been
interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential
anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "Die
Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Process (The Trial),
and Das Schloss (The Castle). The term Kafkaesque has entered the
English language to describe situations like those in his writing.

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family

in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He trained as a lawyer, and after
completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance
company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the
course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close
friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and
formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never
married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
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Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story
collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A
Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as "Die Verwandlung")
were published in literary magazines but received little public
attention. Kafka's unfinished works, including his novels Der
Process, Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der
Verschollene, The Man Who Disappeared), were ordered by Kafka to
be destroyed by his friend Max Brod, who nonetheless ignored his
friend's direction and published them after Kafka's death. His work
went on to influence a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and
philosophers during the 20th century.

The characters in his novels usually have no name and are referred to
as K. They are invariably people deprived of spiritual security and
tortured by anxiety and loneliness. They are generally people
frustrated in their attempts to realize their goals, such as knowledge,
social acceptance and salvation. Their lives alternate from hope to
despair, from attempt to failure. They experience painful alienation
from a vague divine authority. This alienation is experienced as being
rooted in some obscure personal guilt and seems to be a sort of
inescapable destiny. The strong existentialist flavour of all these
themes should be evident, especially the angst, the ennui and the
absurd.

Thus, in The Trial (1925), a man Joseph K., is arrested, convicted

and tried by a mysterious court. He tries to discover what his crime
has been and who his accusers are. But to no avail. Finally, he resigns
himself to the inevitable and submits to execution but not before we
are given a faint hope of salvation in that he glimpses a hazy figure in
white just before he dies. The Castle (1926) tells of the struggle and
futility of an individual who arrives in a village and tries to win the
acceptance of the people and seek admission to a castle, home of an
unknown supreme authority.His more famous stories include “the
Judgment”, “The Metamorphosis”, “in the Penal Colony”, and “A
Hunger Artist”.

His writings are a weird mixture of the realistic and the grotesque,
blending detailed descriptions with an overall atmosphere of fantasy
and nightmare. Events and objects are portrayed with apparent
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precision but he also conveys the meaninglessness and

purposelessness of everything. Like himself, his works seem to
belong to no particularly identifiable background or school- which, in
itself, is a ‘typically existentialist theme’!

X. FYODR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY

(1821-1881)

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, November 1821 – 9 February

1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist,
short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's
literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political,
social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia, and engage
with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. He began
writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in
1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and
Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The
Brothers Karamazov (1880). Dostoyevsky's oeuvre consists of 11
novels, three novellas, 17 short stories and numerous other works.
Many literary critics rate him as one of the
greatest psychologists in world literature. His 1864 novella Notes
from Underground is considered to be one of the first works
of existentialist literature.

In the following years, Dostoyevsky worked as a journalist,

publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A
Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel
around Western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which
led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he
eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded
Russian writers. His books have been translated into more than 170
languages. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his
native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers
and philosophers including Russians like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov as well as Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-
Paul Sartre. He left the world a legacy of profound and moving
writing which not only brought glory to his beloved Rodina (a term of
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affection applied by Russian patriots to their homeland) but have

assured him a place in every serious study or anthology of
existentialism. He was born into a lower middle –class family in
Moscow of a harsh, self- righteous father and a pious, gentle mother.
This, and his youthful involvement in subversive groups against the
Tsarist regime, have made it easy for him to viewed as a dedicated
communist before his time and, indeed, this is how he is lionized by
Red Russia today.

His first story, Poor Folk (1846) won the enthusiastic praise of critics
because it injected something new into Russian literature of the time:
a study of poor, unhappy people. His memories from the House of
the Dead (1861-62) tells in realistic details of prison life, drawing
from his four year prison experience in Siberia for sedition.
Memories from the Underground (1864) is a remarkable
psychological study of an intellectual and spiritual misfit. Crime and
Punishment (1866) catapulted him once more to the fame that had
been eluding him, telling the story of the young student Rokolnikov
who brutally murders an aged female pawnbroker for reasons that
are as unusual as they are unclear. The Idiot (1868) and The
Possessed (1871-72) are two other, less well-known books of his,
written while travelling on the Continent. He returned to Russia to
write his last and finest work, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-
1880), which tells of the murder of the veil Fyodr Karamazov and its
effect on his four sons – Dmitri, a soldier; Ivan, an intellectual and a
sceptic; Aloysha, a religious mystic who enters a religious order, and
Smerdyakov, the murderer.

Dostoyevsky’s novels embody great characters who are intensely

individual, vital and complex, wrestling as they do, with some
profound issue like the conflict between good and evil or the attempt
to find meaning in cruel world – themes that would be the staple
food of the existentialists. He once wrote in his notebooks (he kept
several and he planned his novels with great care), “they call me a
psychologist. This is not true. I am merely a realist of the higher
sense of the world, that is, I depict all the depths in men and
women.” His Memories of the Underground ranks as one of the most
perceptive studies of the split personality in all literature and when
one of Roskolnikov’s associates says of him, “ in truth, it is exactly as
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though he were alternating between two opposing characters,” he is

but pointing out a trait comment almost all of Dostoevsky’s
characters.

Dostoyevsky’s prison experience yielded him not only excellent

matter, as we have seen, for one of his brilliantly realistic works, it
also had an important and decisive influence on his thought and his
literary work. Though his crime had been as inconsequential as being
a member of a critical group, he began to view his incarceration as a
just retribution and a privileged moment for the purification of his
conscience. From here he derived his doctrine of salvation by
suffering – and life of all this is compatible with the image of a proto
– communist. Furthermore, from all this he arrived at a heightened
respect for the established order of things in Russia – to the Tsarist
regime as well as the Orthodox Church. He became more and more
convinced through his travels that Europe was on the verge of a great
spiritual collapse and that the Russian people had a kind of universal
mission to rescue the doomed materialistic west. Such indeed was
the theme of his speech at the unveiling of the famous Pushkin
Memorial at Moscow. Crime and Punishment is probably his most
popular novel but there is no denying that the famous “ Grand
Inquisitor” passage of The Brothers Karamazov is the most quoted,
discussed and controversial of all he ever wrote.

PART THREE

9. GENERAL CONCLUSION
It is not easy to make an overall or common judgment about a
philosophy that comprises so many different attitudes, from the
atheism of Sartre to the faith of Kierkegaard or Jaspers, from the
courageous despair of Camus to the pathways into Being of
Heidegger. Nor can we deny that existentialism has become for many
shallow people a kind of posture or pose- a convenient excuse for
long hair, drop outs and drugs!

But perhaps that phase is over and existentialism is beginning to be

appreciated for what it is – a philosophy in its own right and a deep
and challenging philosophy at that! And if it was fist greeted
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indulgently in America- and other English – speaking circles as

something typical of the over-emotional Latin temperament which
had taken the aftermath of world war II too seriously … well, Viet
Nam, the threat of nuclear war and the crisis of values and faith have
all combined to make angst, ennui and dread very real experiences
nowadays. Suddenly, the writings of the great existentialists begin to
ring true!

The moral scene in India has long been one in which despair and
frustration are fife. Unfortunately, it has been mainly the nihilistic
and destructive existentialism of Sartre that has been devoured,
digested and dealt out by our intellectuals, our “modern” playwrights
and men of letters, in general. It is a pity that few Indians know of
Camus and Heidegger and Jaspers – fewer, at any rate, than can tell
of hell being the other. Much of this is, no doubt, due to the fact that
the average Indians has known quite a bit of the abuse of authority-
by parents, priests and politicians, hence, Sartrean views on freedom
can easily sound like a rallying cry for rebellious youngsters (and
oldsters) are smarting over domestic dictators, invariably, this but
creates a shallow and transient misfit or dropout who, after some
radical noises, eventually throws in his/her lot with the rat race. This
is sterile and ineffectual revolutionism.

In pint of fact, the chief merit of existentialism is that it has

recovered the prophetic dimension of life – an attitude which is as
old as the Bible and is characteristic of the great religions of the
world. It summons man to authentic life, to a disturbing reflection on
the values he lives by, to self-assessment and to commitment to a
world more human and just, the writings of many existentialists
have, indeed, a prophetic import. They strip the tinsel and glitter
from much that passes off as “progress” and “civilization” in today’s
world. They expose the harsh contradictions between the lip-values
proclaimed by institutions and the self-seeking motives and goals of
those who man these same structures. Existentialism is a call to
reality that comes at a timely moment when the fraud of “canned
happiness” is practically put on sale at the market, when religions
deal in false securities and when people are tempted to wash their
hands off the whole business of life. However, in the (legitimate)
attack on empty conformism and mediocrity, existentialism can
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easily lend itself to postures and faddism. The attack on conformity,

then, becomes as phony as that which it combats. Some brands of
existentialism but produce a “forlornness and respire” of existence
that is no more than a “self-satisfied, rather cozy defiance of the
universe,” as Will Herborg says.

Existentialism can also, in the hands of the immature and shallow,

create smug, self-righteous, “holier-than-thou” hears and spirits. It
can become individualistic, egocentric and inhuman. This is of
course, a corruption and a caricature of existentialism, a betrayal of
all that existentialism is trying to retain a sense of responsibility to
the community. Indeed, for many- thanks to Sartre- freedom is that
which divides us and set us all apart, busily doing “our own things”:
the freedom which unites, which builds community is forgotten!

Existentialism, like many of the finest and best things in life, can all
too easily be misuse or abused. It presupposes not a little maturity of
mind in its adherents. But few will deny that it is “the most
stimulating and disturbing, the most bewildering and illuminating
though in a good many generations” (Roger L. Shinn).

BEST WISHES!
 80

Dr. Jojo Joseph Varakukalayil CST

Tel: +91-7356988372; 91-484-2980045

Email:[email protected]; [email protected]